The James Webb Space Telescope discovers the oldest known galaxies

A group of international astronomers have used data from the James Webb Space Telescope to report the discovery of the earliest galaxies confirmed to date.

In work that NASA says has yet to be peer-reviewed, scientists found that light from these galaxies took more than 13.4 billion years to reach Earth, since the galaxies date back less than 400 million years after the Big Bang .

Previous data from Webb had provided candidates for young galaxies, and the targets were confirmed by spectroscopic observations.

These observations revealed characteristic and unmistakable patterns in the light emitted by the faint galaxies.

Using observations from the JADES program (JADES) (Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey), the observations focused on the area in and around the Ultra Deep Field of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Starting with the telescope’s Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, the JADES program took more than 10 days of mission time to observe the field in nine different infrared colors.

The youngest galaxies can be distinguished in images based on the light that is stretched up to 14 times in wavelength.

Using observations from the JADES program (JADES) (Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey), the observations focused on the area in and around the Ultra Deep Field of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Starting with the telescope’s Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, the JADES program took more than 10 days of mission time to observe the field in nine different infrared colors.

In picturesthe youngest galaxies can be distinguished by the up to 14-fold wavelength stretched light.

NASA said the astronomers were looking for faint galaxies that are visible in the infrared but whose light is abruptly cut off at a critical wavelength.

The agency noted that the position of the boundary within each galaxy’s spectrum is shifted as the universe expands.

Then, for three days, the team used the near-infrared spectrograph to collect the light from 250 faint galaxies, studying the patterns in the spectrum caused by the atoms in each galaxy, resulting in a precise measurement of each galaxy’s redshift and revealing the properties of the gas and the stars in these galaxies.

Four of the galaxies were discovered to be unprecedentedly early, at redshifts greater than 10, or when the Universe was about 330 million years old.

“We first discovered galaxies just 350 million years after the Big Bang, and we can be absolutely sure of their fantastic distances,” said co-author Brant Robertson of the University of California Santa Cruz and a member of the NIRCam science team. “Finding these early galaxies in such breathtakingly beautiful images is a special experience.”

Next year, JADES will proceed with a detailed survey of another field, this one focused on the iconic Hubble Deep Field.