NASA’s new toy may have already spotted the oldest known galaxy

One of the goals for the James Webb Space Telescope was to be able to see the Universe's first stars. We're getting a strong indication that it's a success a few weeks after it was revealed. In some of the data NASA has made public, researchers have seen as many as five galaxies from the distant Universe. One of them will be the most distant, if they are confirmed to be so far away.

Opening up

Astronomers can submit proposals for observation at many of NASA's telescopes, and users can have exclusive access to the resulting data for a period of time afterwards. The data from NASA's newest instrument will be made public immediately, for anyone to analyze as they please. A location similar to one of the first images released is one of these.

The details of one of the datasets used for this analysis can be found on the website.

The images were taken at different parts of the spectrum. The full range of the wavelengths that the NIRCam instrument covers was divided into seven chunks and each chunk was imaged for up to six hours. A large international team of researchers used these chunks to perform an analysis that would help them identify distant galaxies by looking for objects that were present in some parts of the spectrum.

After the formation of the Cosmic Microwave Background, most of the Universe was filled with hydrogen atoms. The Universe would be made opaque to these wavelengths by the absorption of light above a wavelength that was enough to ionize the hydrogen. The cutoff was somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. The Universe's expansion shifted the cutoff into theIR portion of the spectrum, which was one of the main reasons that the Webb was designed to be sensitive to these wavelength.

The team looked for objects that were in the lowest energy chunks of the spectrum but not in the higher energy chunks. The point at which it vanished is a good indicator of how far away the galaxy is. Future research will involve a similar approach

A draft manuscript focuses on the two most distant of the five objects that were produced by this method. If confirmed, the former would be the closest object we know about and the furthest away from the Bigbang.