The two newly-seen galaxies are both much smaller that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and one appears to be unexpectedly elongated.īecause so many early, bright galaxies have been seen by JWST, astronomers are having to rethink their old ideas about the evolution of the universe. "There's certainly a lot of discussion going on." "We feel very confident about these two, but less confident about the others," says Illingworth. But those are more tentative observations. Since astronomers started using JWST, some have claimed to have spotted galaxies from even earlier times, like 250 million years after the Big Bang. That latter discovery broke a record set by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2016, when it managed to glimpse a galaxy called GN-z11, which existed about 400 million years after the Big Bang.Īstronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz was a member of the team that found GN-z11, and says that seeing it was "a huge surprise." But now, with the help of their new space telescope, scientists know it wasn't just a weird outlier - because they have at least two more examples. In research papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Treu and other astronomers report the discovery of one galaxy that dates back to just 450 million years after the beginning, and another that dates back to 350 million years. "JWST has opened up a new frontier, bringing us closer to understanding how it all began." "Just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, there are already lots of galaxies," says Tommaso Treu, an astronomer at the University of California at Los Angeles.
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