Webb Space Telescope sees early galaxies hidden from Hubble

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s Webb Space Telescope is finding bright, early galaxies hitherto hidden from view, including one that may have formed just 350 million years after the cosmic big bang.

Astronomers said on Thursday that if the results are verified, this newly discovered crowd of stars would beat the farthest galaxy identified by the Hubble Space Telescope, a record holder that formed 400 million years after the universe was formed.

Launched last December as a successor to Hubblethe Webb telescope indicates that stars may have formed earlier than previously thought – perhaps within a few million years of creation.

Webb’s latest discoveries were described in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by an international team led by Rohan Naidu of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The article takes a closer look at two exceptionally bright galaxies, the first thought to have formed 350 million years after the Big Bang and the other 450 million years after.

Naidu said Webb needs more observations in the infrared before claiming another distance record holder.

While some researchers report discovering galaxies 13.8 billion years ago that are even closer to the creation of the universe, those candidates have yet to be verified, scientists stressed at a NASA press conference. Some of these may be later galaxies mimicking earlier ones, they noted.

“This is a very dynamic time,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a co-author of the paper published Thursday. “There’s been a lot of tentative announcements from even earlier galaxies, and we’re still trying as a community to figure out which of those are likely to be real.”

Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Los Angeles, a chief scientist for Webb’s early release science program, said the evidence presented so far is “as solid as it gets” for the galaxy believed to have formed 350 million after the big Bang.

If the findings are verified and there are more early galaxies, Naidu and his team wrote that Webb “will prove highly successful in pushing the cosmic frontier to the brink of the Big Bang.”

“When and how the first galaxies formed remains one of the most intriguing questions,” they said in their paper.

NASA’s Jane Rigby, a project scientist at Webb, noted that these galaxies were “hiding just below the limits of what Hubble could do.”

“They were there waiting for us,” she told reporters. “So that’s a happy surprise that there are a lot of these galaxies to study.”

The $10 billion observatory — the world’s largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space — is in orbit around the sun 1.6 million miles from Earth. Full science operations began in the summer, and NASA has since released a series of dazzling snapshots of the universe.

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