![]() ![]() (Only as those stars exploded did they forge heavier elements such as oxygen and spew them into the cosmos.) Now scientists are hoping the telescope will find an absence of heavy elements in even earlier galaxies - evidence that these galaxies contain only Population III stars, the hypothesized first stars in the universe, thought to have been monstrously huge and made entirely from hydrogen and helium. With its spectrograph, JWST detected heavy elements, particularly oxygen, in the galaxy. The telescope took a closer look at one distant galaxy in the image, a smudge of light that dates to 700 million years after the Big Bang. Pascale and Mahler found up to 16 remote galaxies that have been magnified in the image their exact ages aren’t yet known. Called SMACS 0723, the cluster is so heavy that it bends the light of more distant objects, bringing them into view. More early galaxies hide in the image of the galaxy cluster presented by President Biden and studied by Pascale and Mahler. “It’s better than I imagined and it’s only the beginning,” she said. ![]() Just weeks into the survey, the team has bagged a handful of galaxies from the universe’s first 500 million years, although Larson and her colleagues haven’t released their exact findings yet. More studies will be done to break apart their light to glean their characteristics.Īnother early-universe program has also turned up “incredibly distant galaxies,” said Rebecca Larson, an astronomer at the University of Texas, Austin and a member of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey. One of the young galaxies even shows evidence of a disklike structure. ![]() “It would be the most distant galaxy ever found,” said Castellano.īoth galaxies look extremely small, perhaps 100 times smaller than the Milky Way, yet they show surprising rates of star formation and already contain 1 billion times the mass of our sun - more than expected for galaxies this young. Both teams, one led by Rohan Naidu at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and the other by Marco Castellano at the Astronomical Observatory of Rome, identified two especially remote galaxies in the data: one so far away that JWST detects the light it emitted 400 million years after the Big Bang (a tie with the oldest galaxy ever seen by the Hubble Space Telescope), and the other, dubbed GLASS-z13, seen as it appeared 300 million years after the Big Bang. Two teams found the galaxy when they separately analyzed JWST observations for the GLASS survey, one of more than 200 science programs scheduled for the telescope’s first year in space. ![]()
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