We ’ ve Now Discovered the Four Oldest Galaxies Ever Observed

Nobody knows exactly when the 13.8-billion-year-old universe first switched on its stellar lights, but the best guess for the emergence of the earliest stars and galaxies is sometime in the first 400 million years. Determining precisely when in that ancient epoch the great illumination occurred is one of the main goals set for the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which launched on Dec. 25, 2021 and has been hard at work scanning the heavens since it completed its deployment and its instruments came online in the summer of 2022.
This week, Webb hit paydirt. According to two papers published in the journal Nature, an international team of 80 astronomers from 10 countries has discovered the four oldest galaxies ever observed, including one that dates back to just 320 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 2% of its current age. (Our solar system and the Earth itself are, by contrast, just 4.5 billion years old.)
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“To find these galaxies in such stunningly beautiful images is a special experience,” said astronomer and co-author Brant Robinson of the University of California Santa Cruz, in a statement released by the European Space Agency (ESA). “We can be absolutely confident of their fantastic distances.”
The quartet of ancient galaxies were found in a patch of sky known as the Hubble Space Telescope’s (HST) Ultra Deep Field, a relatively small region that is nonetheles...

Source: TIME: Science - April 6, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized Space Source Type: news