JWST Peers Deep Into The Universe's Early Galaxies, Revealing Something Surprising

Astronomers' understanding of the early universe is being changed by observations from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Researchers using the powerful observatory have now published papers in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, documenting two extremely bright and far away galaxies, based on data gathered within the first few days of the observatory going operational in July.

Astronomers on a NASA press call said that their extreme luminosity pointed to two intriguing possibilities.

The first thing that comes to mind is that these are very large, with lots of low-mass stars, and had to start forming 100 million years after the Big bang.

The universe was only made of gas and dark matter at that time.

A second possibility is that they are made up of "Population III" stars, which have never been observed but are believed to have been made of only hydrogen and helium.

The stars burned so brightly that they wouldn't need to be as big to account for the brightness seen by the astronomer.

The University of California at Santa Cruz's Garth Illingworth told reporters that they are not sure what is happening in the area.

The discovery of such a large volume of space was unexpected.

It's a bit of a surprise that there are so many of them.

Most distant starlight

450 and 350 million years after the Bigbang, the two galaxies were found to exist.

GLASS-z12 is the most distant starlight ever seen.

It takes a long time for the light to reach us from the distant objects.

The expansion of the universe has stretched the light from the distant galaxies to theIR.

It is possible to detect the light at a much higher resolution than before.

Illingworth told Agence France-Presse that disentangling the two competing hypotheses would be a real challenge and that the Population III idea was more appealing to him.

The teams are hoping to use the instruments to confirm the distance and better understand the composition of the universe.

The mass of the two galaxies could be weighed by the ALMA, which would help decide between the two theories.

"JWST has opened up a new frontier, bringing us closer to understanding how it all began," said Tommaso treu of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Agence France- Presse.