NASA’s james webb space telescope Dozens of galaxies have been detected that may be among the earliest known galaxies in the universe.
Using early observations from telescopes, the astronomers looked for galaxies at “very high redshifts,” which would indicate that these galaxies formed earlier in the universe. Team finds 87 galaxies that may have been the first to appear in the universe, some 200 million to 400 million years later big BangAccording to a statement from the University of Missouri.
“Finding a number so large Galaxies Early parts of the universe suggest we may need to revise our previous understanding galaxy formation“Our discovery gives us the first indication that there are many more galaxies in the universe than previously thought,” Haojing Yan, an astronomer at the University of Missouri and lead author of the study, said in the statement.
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the team explored redshifts In infrared light captured by Webb. This method allowed them to measure how far away the galaxies are by observing how the colors change in the waves of light they emit.
“If a light-emitting source is moving toward us, the light is being ‘squeezed’, and that shorter wavelength is represented by blue light, or blueshift,” Yan said in the statement. “But if that source [of light] Moving away from us, the light it produces is being ‘stretched’, and changed to a longer wavelength which is represented by red light, or redshift.
The universe has passed since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago nonstop expansionmeans the galaxies that we see outside our Galaxy The galaxy is moving away from us. The higher the redshift, the more distant the galaxy is from us. And because light from other galaxies takes a long time to reach us, the more distant a galaxy is, the earlier we see it as time goes on. As such, looking for galaxies at very high redshifts provides insight into the early universe.
“The speed of light “It is finite, so it takes time for light to travel a distance to reach us,” Yan said in the statement. “For example, when we see Sunday, we are not looking at how it looks at present, rather we are looking at how it looked eight minutes ago. This is because it takes only so much time for the Sun’s radiation to reach us. So, when we’re looking at galaxies that are very far away, we’re looking at images from a long time ago.”
Objects at high redshift (11 and above) can only be detected by infrared light, which is why Webb was crucial in observing these 87 galaxies. By comparison, Hubble Space Telescope only sees ultraviolet to near-infrared light, which is why astronomers previously thought there were very few galaxies beyond redshift 11.
“I believe this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg because the data we used focused on a very small region of the universe,” Yan said in the statement. “After this, I anticipate that other teams of astronomers will find similar results elsewhere in the vast reaches of space.” [Webb] continues to provide us with a new view of the deepest parts of our universe.”
The findings were published on December 28, 2022 The Astrophysical Journal Letters,
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