Scientists have not yet determined the date of the formation of these galaxies (NASA / Twitter)
Scientists have announced that they have discovered what may be one of the first galaxies to form in the universe, thanks to… James Webb Telescope The new NASA satellite.
Astronomer Haujin Yan said, in a press conference during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, on Monday, that “this is the first large sample of asteroids.”for galaxies Candidate to be the first in its formation beyond the reach of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Scientists still consider them “candidate galaxies”, because the dates of their formation have not yet been confirmed.
In the new list of 87 galaxies discovered by astronomers, some of them may date back regarding 13.6 billion years, just 200 million years following the Big Bang.
Scientists have studied distant galaxies dating back to the beginnings of the universe, but Yan and his colleagues’ discoveries might shatter these records by a few hundred million years.
Determining a galaxy’s history can be tricky. Its “redshift” is measured, the amount of light it emits that extends towards longer red wavelengths, which tells astronomers regarding the speed with which the galaxy is moving away from us in the rapidly expanding universe.
This, in turn, tells astronomers the galaxy’s distance from Earth, or more specifically, the distance photons (particles of light) must travel from their stars at the speed of light before reaching a near-Earth space telescope, such as James Webb’s.
The light from stars in the most distant galaxy in this group may have been emitted 13.6 billion years ago, likely shortly following the young galaxy consolidated.
