I expect that many more distant galaxies will be found over the next years.” “JWST has been built exactly for this purpose, to push our observational horizon to the first galaxies. “Already now, there have been several candidates published that would be much further back in time than GLASS-13, if confirmed,” Oesch says. However, he cautions, “We do not know the exact distance yet.”īut of course, thanks to JWST, GLASS-z13’s potentially superlative status is wavering. “GLASS-z13 is one of the first luminous sources that we found at a distance larger than can be observed with the Hubble Space Telescope,” Pascal Oesch, an assistant professor at the University of Geneva who was part of the team that identified GLASS-z13, tells Astronomy. That makes the galaxy roughly 100 million years older than the previous oldest galaxy ever spotted by astronomers, GN-z11. JWST revealed GLASS-z13 as it existed around 13.5 billion years ago, when the universe was no more than 350 million years old. But based on a detailed analysis, this innocuous blob has since proven to be one of the most distant, and thus oldest, galaxies ever seen. In the deep background of one of JWST’s first images was an unassuming red dot. In fact, JWST might have already helped unseat a previous record-holder for the earliest and most distant galaxy. Thanks to the space telescope’s powerful, gold-plated patchwork of 18 hexagonal mirrors, it can peer farther into the universe - and thus further back in time - than any previous instrument. So, it’s only natural to assume some of its discoveries will smash current records.Īnd sure enough, in its first month of science operations, JWST has exceeded expectations. The recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is set to play a key role in the future of astronomy.
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