(Washington) Just a week after the revelation of the first images of the James Webb space telescope, the most powerful ever, it may have already found the most distant galaxy ever observed, which existed 13.5 billion years ago. years.
Posted at 5:35 p.m.
Named GLASS-z13, it appears to us as it was only about 300 million years after the Big Bang, 100 million years younger than the previous record observed, Rohan Naidu, from the Center told AFP. of Astrophysics from Harvard.
He is the lead author of a study analyzing data from the early observations of James Webb, which is currently underway. These data are posted online for all astronomers on the planet.
One of the main missions of this brand new telescope is to observe the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
In astronomy, seeing far is like going back in time. Sunlight, for example, takes eight minutes to reach us, so we see it as it was eight minutes ago. By looking as far as possible, we can therefore perceive objects as they were billions of years ago.
The light from this galaxy was emitted 13.5 billion years ago.
This study has not yet been peer-reviewed, but published as a “preprint” in order to be quickly accessible to the expert community. It has been submitted to a scientific journal for forthcoming publication, said Rohan Naidu.
But already, many astronomers enthusiastically commented on this discovery on social networks.
“Records in astronomy are already faltering,” tweeted Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator responsible for science. “Yes, I tend to only applaud peer-reviewed scientific results. But this is very promising! he added of the study.
Another research team also concluded with the same results, according to Rohan Naidu, which “gives him confidence”.
Fuzzy point in the cosmos
The galaxy was observed by James Webb’s NiRcam instrument, and detected on what is called a “deep field”, i.e. a wider image taken with a long exposure time in order to detect the faintest lights.
The peculiarity of James Webb is to work only in the infrared. The light emitted by older objects stretched and “reddened” along the way, passing into that wavelength not visible to the human eye.
To draw an image of this galaxy, the data has therefore been “translated” into the visible spectrum: it then appears as a red circular shape, rather fuzzy, and white in its center.
In reality, the twenty or so researchers who took part in the study studied two galaxies, the other being called GLASS-z11, which is less distant.
They have surprising characteristics, for the little that we already know: “They appear quite massive”, according to Rohan Naidu, and this from “very shortly after the Big Bang”. “It’s something we don’t really understand,” he added.
When exactly did they form? Impossible to say at the moment.
“There is still work to do,” said the researcher. He and his colleagues have requested more observing time with the telescope to perform spectroscopic analyzes – a technique for determining the properties of a distant object through the analysis of captured light. This should confirm their distance.
The James Webb Telescope was launched into space about six months ago. Worth $10 billion, it was placed 1.5 million kilometers from us.
It has enough fuel to run for 20 years. Astronomers thus expect to be inundated with new cosmic discoveries for a long time to come.