New images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope show what may be one of the first galaxies ever observed. The images include objects from over 13 billion years ago, and one offers a much wider field of view than Webb’s first Deep Field image, which was released on July 12. The images represent some of the first in a major collaboration of astronomers and other university researchers teaming up with NASA and global partners to uncover new information about the universe.
The images were taken from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), led by a scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an associate professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is one of 18 co-investigators from 12 institutions with more than 100 collaborators from the United States and nine other countries. CEERS researchers study how some of the earliest galaxies formed when the universe was less than 5% of its current age, during a period known as reionization, and how galaxies evolved between then and now .
The team has identified a particularly exciting object which they say is being observed because it was just 290 million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers call this a redshift of z~14.
The finding was posted on the arXiv preprint server and is awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed journal. If the discovery is confirmed, it would be one of the earliest galaxies ever observed, and its presence would indicate that galaxies began to form much earlier than many astronomers thought.
The razor-sharp images reveal a flurry of complex galaxies evolving over time – some elegantly mature windmills, some toddler blobby, still others wispy swirls of do-so-doing neighbors. The images, which took around 24 hours to collect, come from a patch of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper, a constellation officially named Ursa Major. This same area of sky has previously been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, as seen in the Extended Groth Band.
“These images are exciting because the number of these candidate super-high redshift galaxies is larger than expected,” Kartaltepe said. “We knew we would find some, but I don’t think anyone thought we would find as many as we have. This either means the universe works a little differently than we thought, or there are many other sources of contamination and these candidates will turn out to be something else. The reality is probably a mixture of both.
Kartaltepe has several main roles in the survey, focusing on morphology – measuring the shapes and sizes of galaxies and studying the evolution of their structures – and setting up and analyzing spectroscopic observations of distant galaxies using the NIRSpec instrument. Three of his Astrophysical Science and Technology Ph.D. students — Isabella Cox, Caitlin Rose and Brittany Vanderhoof — participated in the survey and worked with the data.
The entire CEERS program will involve over 60 hours of telescope time. Much more imaging data will be collected in December, along with spectroscopic measurements of hundreds of distant galaxies.
Kartaltepe is also a Principal Investigator of COSMOS-Web, the largest general observer program selected for the first year of JWST. During 218 hours of observation, COSMOS-Web will perform an ambitious survey of half a million galaxies with high-resolution multiband near-infrared imagery and an unprecedented 32,000 mid-infrared galaxies. JWST is expected to start collecting the first data for COSMOS-Web in December.
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Materials provided by Rochester Institute of Technology. Original written by Luke Auburn. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.