NASA's Webb Space Telescope is uncovering previously unseen brilliant, early galaxies, including one that may have originated just 350 million years after the Big Bang, which created the universe as we know it.
If the findings are confirmed on Friday, astronomers say, this new galaxy cluster would be further out than the most distant galaxy observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, which was created 400 million years after the Big Bang.
Stars may have formed sooner than originally believed, probably within a few of million years of creation, according to data from the Webb telescope, which was launched in December as a replacement to Hubble.
The most recent findings from the Webb Space Telescope were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by an international team lead by Rohan Naidu of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The article expands on two very luminous galaxies, one of which is considered to have arisen 350 million years after the Big Bang and the other 450 million years following.
Naidu has said that further infrared observations by Webb are required before a new record for distance can be claimed.
NASA scientists emphasised during a press conference that although some researchers claim to have discovered galaxies even closer to the start of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, such possibilities have yet to be verified. They speculated that some of them could be later galaxies that only look like older ones.
“This is a very dynamic time," according to Garth Illingworth, co-author of the article published Thursday. “There have been lots of preliminary announcements of even earlier galaxies, and we’re still trying to sort out as a community which ones of those are likely to be real.”
Chief scientist for Webb's early release science programme, Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Los Angeles, said the data offered so far is "as robust as it gets" for the galaxy thought to have formed 350 million yrs old after the Big Bang.
As long as more early galaxies are found, Naidu and his team predict Webb “will prove highly successful in pushing the cosmic frontier all the way to the brink of the Big Bang.”
"When and how the first galaxies formed remains one of the most intriguing questions," the researchers wrote in their study.
The galaxies, according to NASA's Jane Rigby, “were hiding just under the limits of what Hubble could do.”
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“They were right there waiting for us,” she told reporters. “So that's a happy surprise that there are lots of these galaxies to study.”
Located one million miles (1.6 million kilometres) from Earth, the $10 billion observatory is the biggest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space. Over the summer, NASA resumed its full scientific activities, and since then, it has published a series of stunning images of the cosmos.
