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The James Webb Space Telescope released a recent image containing 45,000 galaxies.
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About 700 of those galaxies are new discoveries and some of the youngest ever observed.
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New galaxies are helping scientists reveal the secrets of our early universe like never before.
If you have a lot of time on your hands, you can count 45,000 galaxies here new picture from James Webb Space Telescope.
What you see here is not a random patch of space.
This is actually a very famous region called the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, or CANDY. Astronomers who want to spy on earliest stage of our universe come here to see.
Scientists have been studying GOODS for years using a variety of instruments, including Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatoryand Spitzer Space Telescope, just to name a few.
But JWST is so far the most powerful telescope to turn its gaze to GOODS. And the results show it. This recent image from Webb offers astronomers an unprecedented, detailed look back into the past.
“Back then, the earliest galaxies we could see looked like tiny holes,” astronomer Kevin Hainline of the University of Arizona said in a statement. “Now, we can see that some of these are actually extended objects with visible structure.”
And JWST didn’t stop there.
The James Webb Space Telescope discovered 100s of new galaxies
JWST also discovered about 700 new galaxies in GOODS. Furthermore, these never-before-seen galaxies are some of the youngest ever observed, dating back between 370 million and 650 million years after Big Bang.
“The thin number of these galaxies are far from predictions from observations made before Webb’s launch,” the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement.
With hundreds more galaxies to study in unprecedented detail, thanks to JWST, astronomers have learned that galaxies in our early universe are more chaotic than previously thought.
In particular, by studying the light signatures of these young galaxies, astronomers found something they didn’t expect: strong emission lines.
“Almost every single galaxy we’ve looked for shows unusually strong emission line signatures that indicate intense recent star formation,” Endsley said in a statement. “These early galaxies were very good at creating hot, massive stars.”
Ultimately, the results will help astronomers solve a bigger mystery of our early universe called Period of Reionization.
What caused the Epoch of Reionization?
This critical period, which happened more than 13 billion years agois when our universe became transparent, allowing us to see the surrounding cosmos as it is today.
Before the Epoch of Reionization, the gas between galaxies was much more opaque, the researchers found. Therefore, astronomers cannot pass this point in time because their view is essentially blocked.
What triggered this drastic change is unclear. Some have suggested a massive black hole to be credited.
But these new results from JWST suggest the explosion of hot, massive stars in young galaxies could be a major driver.
Webb’s observation of GOODs is part of its JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, aka JADES.
JADES is one of the largest observing telescope programs, and the data will still come in.
Read the original article at Business Insider