Last year, a team of scientists discovered 4 galaxies that were believed to have formed from gas about 350 million years after the Big Bang, which would have made them the oldest galaxies ever discovered, but their sizes were relatively small. Now, an international research team has discovered 6 huge, mysterious objects, likely to be galaxies that formed between 500 and 700 million years after the Big Bang, that is, more than 13 billion years ago.
The new study, published in the journal Nature, says:Nature) last February 22 – that the possible galaxies contain a number of stars almost as many as the number of stars in the Milky Way as we know it today, and it appeared very early in the life of the universe, and it is also so huge that it is difficult to believe that the existence of these galaxies was possible In light of the current cosmological theory.
Erica Nelson, co-author of the paper and assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder, said:University of Colorado Boulder), in Press release Posted on the university’s website dated February 22, “It’s the height of excitement. You don’t expect the early universe to be able to organize itself so quickly. There shouldn’t be a time for these galaxies to form.” However, more data is needed to confirm that these galaxies appear to be large and ancient, and “another possibility is that these objects are a different type of exotic object, like faint quasars, that would be just as interesting,” Nelson said. .
Bright red dots
The findings are the outcome of an investigation by Nilsson and her colleagues – from the United States, Australia, Denmark and Spain – into data that the James Webb telescope was sending back to Earth, called the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey. The images are deep in a patch of sky near the Big Dipper, a relatively dull region of space first observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in the 1990s.
Nelson explains – in the statement – that in astronomy red light is usually equal to ancient light, and with the expansion of the universe since the dawn of time, galaxies and other celestial bodies move away from each other, and the light that it emits stretches, and the longer the light extends, the redder it becomes in the sight of human machines, By contrast, the light emitted from objects approaching Earth appears to be more blue, and this is what caught the attention of Nelson, who was looking at a postage stamp-sized section of one of the pictures when she noticed some “mysterious points” of light that seemed too bright to be They were real, she says. “They were so red and bright. We weren’t expecting to see them.”
Huge galaxies
The team conducted calculations and discovered that their possible ancient galaxies were also huge, harboring tens to hundreds of billions of stars the size of the Sun such as the Milky Way, and yet these primitive galaxies may not be very similar to our galaxy, Nelson explains, saying, “The Milky Way galaxy constitutes approximately “One to two new stars every year. But some of these galaxies must form hundreds of new stars every year throughout the history of the universe.”
Nelson and her colleagues want to use James Webb to gather more information about these mysterious objects, but they’ve already seen enough to pique their curiosity. Initially, calculations suggest there wasn’t enough normal matter – which planets and human bodies are made of – at the time to form many planets. “If one of these galaxies is real, it would expand the frontiers of our understanding of cosmology,” says Nelson.
consecutive discoveries
And Nelson mentioned – in the statement also – that the rapid pace of James Webb’s discoveries is very similar to those early days of the Hubble telescope, at that time many scientists believed that galaxies did not begin to form until billions of years after the Big Bang, but soon researchers discovered that The early universe was more complex and exciting than they imagined, and Nelson concludes, “Although we have already learned a lesson from Hubble, we still do not expect James Webb to see such mature galaxies that existed until now in the past time. I am very excited.”