James Webb has been revealing the universe's deepest secrets.
As James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peers deep into the universe, it has captured the images of galaxies that formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. The images show that these galaxies started forming faster and earlier than expected. According to Time Magazine, the telescope has spotted and confirmed the four oldest galaxies ever seen. A paper mentioning this discovery was presented at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore on December 12. The yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper is available on the pre-publication website arXiv.
"This is the way the galaxies would have appeared 13.4 billion years ago. With Webb you can rewind the clock and see them as they were back then. That's what we're trying to do by taking these observations: we're looking back in time," lead author Brant Robertson, professor of astronomy and physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Time Magazine.
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The new findings show that the galaxies started forming as early as 325 million years after the Big Bang, and point to the fact that there are ones that are older still. The scientists studying the images are hopeful they will help them discover the actual birth image of the very first galaxies, Time Magazine further said.
"JWST has opened up a new frontier, bringing us closer to understanding how it all began," said Tommaso Treu, an astronomer at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Out of the four galaxies discovered by James Webb, one dates back to just 350 million years after the Big Bang, said NPR. This discovery has broken the record set by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016, when it managed to glimpse a galaxy called GN-z11, which existed about 400 million years after the Big Bang, the outlet added.
The telescope was launched in December last year and orbits the Sun about a million miles away from Earth.