2023-12-11 13:07:00
03:07 PM Monday, December 11, 2023
The James Webb Telescope captured a new image of one of the galaxies at the dawn of the universe, as it formed only 900 million years following the Big Bang that occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
The galaxy, named AzTECC71, appears as a blurry patch of light, a far cry from many of the other stunning images of galaxies and galaxy clusters observed by James Webb. However, even this smudge holds important lessons for our understanding of the early universe.
“It’s a faint object that can barely be seen in the most sensitive imaging from our latest telescope,” study author Jed McKinney of the University of Texas at Austin said in a statement. “But it might potentially tell us that there was a whole group of galaxies that was hidden from us.”
Scientists say this might mean the early universe was dustier than previously thought, shedding more light on how it has evolved since the Big Bang roughly 13.8 billion years ago.
The AzTECC71 galaxy was first observed as an incomprehensible bubble of light by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii. Later, it was also observed by the ALMA radio telescope in Chile. However, it appeared to disappear in images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
“Even though it looks like a small bubble, it actually forms hundreds of new stars every year,” McKinney said.
As part of an international effort to map the early structures of the universe, McKinney and his colleagues searched for the galaxy in data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope. This observatory’s powerful and unprecedented infrared eye is able to peer into dense clouds of dust from the early universe.
Before the James Webb Space Telescope, these galaxies were impossible to find. One in five such galaxies remained invisible to the Hubble telescope, forming a group that astronomers call “Hubble dark galaxies.”
“This means that our understanding of the evolutionary history of galaxies is biased because we only see unobscured, less dusty galaxies,” McKinney said, according to the Live Science website.
In the near future, McKinney and his team plan to uncover more faint and hidden galaxies using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, which can not only “peer into the furthest reaches of the universe, but can also penetrate the thickest veils of dust.”
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