Webb telescope turns up baffling views of the early universe [View all]

By Adam Mann published about 20 hours ago
New results from the James Webb Space Telescope challenge prevailing models of the early universe.



This image — a mosaic of 690 individual frames taken with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the James Webb Space Telescope—covers an area of sky about eight times as large as Webb’s First Deep Field Image released on July 12. It’s from a patch of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper. (Image credit: NASA/STScI/CEERS/TACC/S. Finkelstein/M. Bagley/Z. Levay)

Just over a year after its historic launch, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is challenging astronomers’ expectations of the early universe and showing that massive galaxies likely formed much earlier than predicted.

JWST sees in the far infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is invisible to our eyes, according to NASA. This means that the telescope is optimized to capture light from the early universe, which has been stretched out towards these longer and redder wavelengths as the universe has expanded over time — a process known as redshifting.

Galaxies can come in a variety of types, including beautiful spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way, as well as elliptical or irregular types, astronomer Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York said during a press conference at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

The Hubble Space Telescope had already spotted all the different types of galaxies as far back as 11 billion years ago, suggesting that their formation had occurred even earlier, she added. Some researchers thought that JWST might finally glimpse these early stages of galaxy formation because the telescope sees further back in cosmic history than Hubble, Kartaltepe said.

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https://www.livescience.com/jwst-early-universe-discoveries