The oldest galaxy ever seen by a telescope is called GLASS-z13. The University of Copenhagen is pictured.
The art and the science come first. Astronomers working with one of the pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope believe they have found the oldest galaxy ever imaged, one that is at least 13 billion years old.
As the universe expands, the wavelength of light in the red spectrum becomes stretched. The object in the image is more stretched and older if the image is redder. An astronomer from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics led a team that found a shift in the image of a galaxy that was 13 billion years old.
The most distant starlight ever seen is being looked at by the team. Peer review should hopefully confirm their discovery.
The universe is not much. It contains about a billion stars and is thousands of years old. Our Milky Way has an estimated 200 billion stars. We are seeing it as it was when it was 13 billion years ago. The small, old galaxy merged with others to form a giant mass.
NASA is getting more than just scientific benefits from the telescope. Any politician would envy the results of a new poll taken of 1,000 people.
More than 70% of Americans have a favorable view of NASA, while 13% and 16% don't know. For the first time, there is no partisan divide when it comes to NASA, with men and women giving the thumbs-up to the space agency.
Americans seem unperturbed by the $10 billion price tag for the project. Sixty percent of people think that the investment was a good one, 26% were unsure, and only 13% thought it was ill-spent. The poll was taken between July 14 and 18 and it is possible that the numbers were inflated by that time. One person in the poll said that they were astonished at the beauty of it all. "I was overwhelmed."
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