James Webb has discovered a tiny galaxy in the most distant part of the universe

Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope showed galaxy tiny, whose light corresponds to only 500 million years after the Big Bang, the smallest ever detected at that distance.

A study by an international team led by the University of Minnesota, published in The science traveled more than 13 billion years into the past to discover galaxy unique and tiny, which generated new stars at an extremely high rate for its size.

“This galaxy is far beyond the reach of all telescopes except James Webband these first observations of a distant galaxy are impressive,” said Patrick Kelly, lead author of the paper and assistant professor at the University of Minnesota College of Physics and Astronomy.

One millionth of the Milky Way

“Here we can see almost all the way to the Big Bang, and we never observed galaxies when the universe was so young with this level of detail,” he continues. Volume galaxy That’s about a million times smaller than the Milky Way, but we can see that it still produces the same number of stars every year.”

Telescope James Webb can observe a field wide enough to display an entire cluster galaxies one day. The researchers managed to find and study this tiny new galaxy thanks to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which a mass, such as mass galaxy or a cluster of galaxies, bends and expands the light. cluster lens galaxies this made this small background 20 times brighter than it would have been if the cluster had not amplified its light.

The researchers then used spectroscopy to measure how far galaxy, in addition to some of its physical and chemical properties. Studying galaxies which were present when the universe was much younger could help scientists get closer to answering the big astronomical question of how the universe reionized.

” galaxies that existed when the universe was in its infancy are very different from those we see now in the neighboring universe,” explains Hayley Williams, first author of the paper and a doctoral student at the Minnesota Institute of Astrophysics. “This discovery could help us learn more about the characteristics of those first galaxiesHow do they differ from nearby galaxies and how did the first ones form? galaxies”.

Telescope James Webb it can collect about 10 times more light than the Hubble Space Telescope and is much more sensitive to the longer, redder wavelengths of the infrared spectrum. This allows scientists to access a whole new window of data, the researchers say.

“Space telescope James Webb it has an amazing ability to see very far into the universe,” says Williams. “This is one of the most exciting aspects of this job. We see things that previous telescopes could never have captured. In fact, this is a snapshot of our Universe for the first 500 million years of its life.

The study, which collaborated with researchers from the University of Cantabria, the University of the Basque Country and the University of La Laguna, as well as centers in Denmark, Italy, Israel, Japan and China, was supported by the National Science Foundation. and NASA through the Space Telescope Science Institute, and with additional funding from the Bilateral US-Israel Science Foundation and the Spanish State Research Agency. (Europe Press)

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