Launched at the end of 2021, the NASA telescope regularly showers the world with spectacular shots taken in the depths of space.
According to a study published this week in Nature Astronomy, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed in the infrared four of the most primitive galaxies.
The oldest, JADES-GS-z13-0, has spectral lines with a spectral shift greater than 10. It appeared 320 million years after the Big Bang, which dates back 13.8 billion years. The Universe was then only 2% of its current age. This light is a distance record.
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“A technological tour de force”, praised by Pieter van Dokkum, astronomer at Yale University (USA). This could also call into question our standard model of the formation of galactic structures. Because these galaxies seem to form very early in the history of the cosmos. Far in the past, therefore very distant, they are not very massive compared to the Milky Way.
Not the farthest
Only a hundred million solar masses, against 1500 billion for ours. Poor in metals, they are consistent with the standard model of cosmology. On the other hand, they seem very active in star formation, in proportion to their mass, almost at the same rate, which surprises astrophysicists.
But these are not the most distant galaxies, as we can read on the Internet. Because the Universe is expanding, and even expanding accelerated under the action of dark energy. Which induces that galaxies are today transported even further, literally out of the field of observation…