The James Webb Telescope reveals the oldest galaxies ever seen

Scientists hoped that the world’s most advanced space telescope would offer the unexpected, and “the universe has not let us down. Los Angeles.”

“We discovered that there are many more distant galaxies out there than we expected,” Treau said. “Somehow the universe managed to form galaxies faster and earlier than we thought.”

The Big Bang theory, espoused by many scientists, says that our universe began as a dense, hot bundle of matter so compressed that it would have resembled a single point. This bundle then rapidly expanded, creating a primordial soup of tiny particles that eventually coalesced into the universe we see today.

The new discoveries, announced by NASA at a news conference Thursday, close the curtain once again on what the developing universe looked like a few hundred million years after its momentous beginning.

One of the two galaxies dates back to about 350 million years after the Big Bang, making it the most distant galaxy ever discovered. It is estimated that the new second galaxy existed about 400 million years after the birth of the universe.

Although 350 million years seems like an unimaginably long time after the Big Bang, it is relatively early in the life of our universe.

The age of the universe is 13.8 billion years. “We look back 98 percent of all the time to see a galaxy like this,” said Garth Illingworth, an astronomer from the University of California, Santa Cruz, who helped conceive of the Webb telescope idea in the 1980s.

He added, “I fully expect that we will find some very distant galaxies.”

Astronomers talk about these distant galaxies as appearing very red. This is because they are so far away and moving so fast that the wavelengths of light are being stretched due to the expansion of the universe.

However, the landscape within the galaxies themselves is very different.

“It’s really a small clump of stars and gas. Very, very blue. Very chaotic,” Illingworth said, adding that these distant galaxies are only two-twentieth the size of our own Milky Way.

Distant galaxies are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, but they contain smaller amounts of other elements. Lack of elements is a sign of youth. The elements that exist today took hundreds of millions of years to develop.

The stars in these early galaxies are a million times brighter than our sun.

“We’re trying to see if they’re really young stars,” said Dan Ko, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Webb’s telescope has “opened up new frontiers, bringing us closer to understanding how it all began, and we’re just beginning to explore it,” Trieu said.

A $10 billion collaboration with NASA and the European and Canadian space agencies, the James Webb Space Telescope took 30 years to build and use 18 six-pointed mirrors. Images and data from the telescope offer glimpses of history that could only be imagined until now.

Early images and data from the telescope showed “how quickly our understanding of galaxies is changing,” said Cihan Kartaltepe, an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology and a co-investigator of the Science Survey for the Early Edition of Cosmic Evolution.

Coe added, “Webb blew us away at every step.”

Looking back to the very early universe allows humans to ask profound questions about our place in the universe.

“It’s part of our origin story,” Illingworth said.