JAMES WEBB TELESCOPE CAPTURES MOST DISTANT FASCINATING GALAXIES

The astronomy community is still in awe of the celestial bodies that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has observed. It broke the records set earlier, this time capturing two of the earliest and most distant galaxies ever seen. The two galaxies, JADES-GS-z14-0 and JADES-GS-z14-1, were observed at least 100 million years before the previous record holder and were thought to have existed for around 300 million years following the Big Bang. This indicates that the light from this galaxy that the JWST observed has been travelling toward us for 13.5 billion years.

Team member and scientist Francesco D'Eugenio of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology said in a statement, "These galaxies join a small but growing population of galaxies from the first half billion years of cosmic history where we can really probe the stellar populations and the distinctive patterns of chemical elements within them." These findings are a part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program, which attempts to shed light on how primordial galaxies evolved 13.8 billion years ago and involved stars, gas, and black holes.

Even though JADES-GS-z14-0 is smaller than the Milky Way, its size is still astounding. It is forming stars at a rate 20 times faster than our own galaxy, despite being 1,600 light-years across. It is also exceptionally bright, and the fact that young stars account for a large portion of its luminosity provides evidence for the rapid formation of massive, massive galaxies—which have not been discovered to this day—in the early universe. 

According to Daniel Eisenstein, the leader of the JADES team at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), "the size of the galaxy clearly proves that most of the light is being produced by large numbers of young stars, rather than material falling onto a supermassive black hole in the galaxy's centre, which would [make it] appear much smaller."

In the end, this finding also serves as evidence of the remarkable powers of the JWST. Ben Johnson, a researcher from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the JADES team, says, "The JWST will allow us to find more of these galaxies, perhaps when the universe was even younger." "This is an incredible chance to learn about the origins of galaxies."