For the first time, 5 super-objects from 13.6 billion years ago have been revealed.
The James Webb Space Telescope has just set a new record by capturing images of objects that existed when the universe was just over 200 million years old.
"We are entering completely unexplored territory and cannot be certain what we will find," scientists describe a new study of five objects that could be the universe's first galaxies.
Analyzing data from the James Webb Space Telescope - the original space explorer developed and operated by NASA - a team of researchers from the US, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Australia and Israel has made an unprecedented discovery.
They are five bright red objects with unprecedentedly high redshifts.
Illustration of a high-redshift galaxy and real images in the left corner, showing five ancient objects recently discovered in the James Webb data - (Image: NASA/ESA/CSA).
The redshift phenomenon occurs because the expansion of the universe causes the wavelengths of light transmitted to us by distant objects to be stretched and seen at the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Therefore, the red color of the above 5 objects shows that they are very ancient. Subsequent calculations show that these 5 objects could be 5 ancient galaxies that existed in the space 13.6 billion years ago.
This number surpasses the old record of the galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, recorded in space about 13.52 billion years ago.
This time also meant an unprecedented distance that James Webb's eyes had reached.
At the moment the light that created the images of these five objects began their journey to Earth — 13.6 billion years ago — they were just that many light years away.
But due to the expansion of the universe, if they still exist today, they would be 34 billion light years away from us.
Accurately estimating the age of galaxies, that is, determining when they formed before they were observed, remains difficult.
According to co-author Dr. Hakim Atek from the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, based on estimates of the age of the universe and the limits that allowed galaxies to begin forming, they were only a maximum of 150 million years old at the time of observation.
"Ultimately, these observations will place tight constraints on the physical processes allowed in our model of the universe," Dr. Atek told Space.com.
According to Dr. Vasily Kokorev from the University of Texas (USA), head of the research team, James Webb's discovery of more and more galaxies with high redshifts shows that their number in the first few hundred million years of the universe was greater than expected.
This means that the early universe was an explosive, rapidly evolving world, not as monotonous as we think.
The discovery of these five galaxy candidates is part of a large sky survey called GLIMPSE to search for ancient objects, in which James Webb is boosted by the foreground galaxy cluster Abell S1063.
Abell S1063 is 4 billion light years away and is a "gravitational lens" , which is like a magnifying glass that magnifies objects behind it thanks to its enormous gravity, bending space-time.
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