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The record for the ‘oldest galaxy’ is changing every day. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Little by little, we are getting closer to areas of early galaxies that have hitherto been unseen by all other telescopes.
On the 17th (local time), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released an image of a galaxy in the Taurus star forming zone. The two galaxies are intertwined like an hourglass.
One of the two galaxies is estimated to have existed about 350 million years after the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, and the other galaxy about 450 million years after the birth of the universe. They are galaxies formed in the relatively early stages of the universe.
Both galaxies were captured in this James Webb Space Telescope image of the outer regions of the giant galaxy cluster Abell 2744. These galaxies are not inside clusters of galaxies, but billions of light-years away behind them. In the picture above, the galaxy marked (1) existed 450 million years after the Big Bang, and the galaxy named (2) existed 350 million years after.
Abell 2744 is about 3.5 billion light-years away from Earth, and the two galaxies captured this time are billions of light-years further away. Therefore, the light they emit is very faint, and the James Webb Space Telescope was able to capture them through infrared gravitational lensing.
“These galaxies are very small compared to our own, making up only a few percent of our galaxy,” NASA said. “These galaxies are only about one twentieth the size of our Milky Way,” explained UC Santa Cruz astronomer Gus Illingworth. “I fully expect that we will find even more distant galaxies,” he added.
The diameter of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years.
These distant galaxies appear very red. This is because they are so far away and moving so fast that the light waves are stretched by the expanding universe.