Over the past two years, it has been broken multiple times, and we expect it to break again soon.
The discovery of what appears to be the most distant galaxy to date was made using the newly operational James Webb Space Telescope.
This has happened two times this year. Astronomers announced in April that they had observed a galaxy in just 330 million years after the Bigbang. One was found at a point 300 million years after the Big bang.
The new record-holder is mind blowing. It was discovered in the middle of the early Universe, just a short time after the big bang.
The discovery of the galaxy candidate marks the beginning of something wonderful, as it will give us an unprecedented view into the dark and mysterious reaches at the beginning of everything.
The paper was submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available on arXiv.
The first billion years after the Bigbang are of interest to physicists. There was a hot, quantum soup that filled the Universe after it winked into existence.
Light is a time machine because it takes a long time to travel from one place to another. The early Universe is so far away that any light that reaches us is very faint.
Even the more visible objects are hard to read due to the expansion of the Universe stretching the most energetic waves into lackluster rays closer to the spectrum.
Reconstructions of that time are very difficult due to this. It's such a critical time that it's all the more sad.
The Cosmic Dawn was when the first stars were born. It filled the Universe with a cloud of hydrogen atoms after the Big bang.
It wasn't until the first stars and galaxies reionized neutrally charged hydrogen that the entire spectrum could be seen.
The Big Bang light could once again shine unimpeded thanks to the Epoch of Reionization.
We want to know more about the Universe's youth during this foggy period, such as how the first stars formed in the dawn clouds, how the first black holes formed, and so on. One of the primary tasks for which Webb is designed is peering back at that distant time.
The highest resolution of any telescope ever sent into space can be captured with the help of the Webb telescope. If not at Cosmic Dawn, then at least during Reionization, it is designed to excel at detecting the very highly redshifted galaxies.
Donnan and his colleagues say that it's necessary to be close to one of the first galaxies after the Bigbang. According to the analysis done by the team, the star formation in the galaxy candidate had to have started between 120 and 220 million years after the Bigbang.
Follow-up observations are needed to confirm the object's identity. From there, the object could become the subject of further, more detailed study and help build a census of early Universe objects.
It won't be wearing the sash for long if it's a galaxy. Chances are good that we won't have to wait long to find out if the object we're looking at is a distant one.
We should bring those red and dim treasures. We're not going to wait.
The research can be found on arXiv.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
