James Webb finds the 4 oldest galaxies, they are more than 13 billion years old

The suspicion was there from the beginning but there was no official and scientific confirmation. The James Webb Space Telescope managed to pinpoint the 4 oldest galaxies of which man has information, formed in the first moments of existence of the universe. Astronomers have confirmed that four ancient galaxies detected by the James Webb Space Telescope in its first months of operation are the oldest that scientists have ever seen and nearly as old as the universe itself.

The galaxies were among hundreds of promising stellar conglomerates found in images from the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (Webb or JWST). But scientists were only able to confirm that these ancient objects were really as old as they looked after observing them in detail with the Near Infrared Spectrograph, which revealed their chemical composition and determined how fast these galaxies are receding from Webb. . Astronomers now know that the light from the four galaxies took more than 13.4 billion years to reach Webb. More precisely, the telescope sees galaxies how they looked just 350 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 2% of its current agealthough the galaxies must have started forming even earlier.

Here’s a statement from Brant Robertson, an astrophysicist at UC Santa Cruz who was involved in the observations.

These galaxies are far beyond what we could have imagined finding before the JWST. With JWST, for the first time we can now find galaxies that distant and thus spectroscopically confirm that they are indeed that far away.

To confirm that the galaxies really were as old as they seemed, astronomers had to get precise estimates of the so-called redshift from the NIRSpec data. Redshift makes objects moving away from us appear redder due to the expansion of the universe, which stretches the light emitted by distant stars and galaxies into longer wavelengths of the light spectrum, which tend to turn red.

The most distant of the galaxies detected by Webb showed a redshift of 13.2, which corresponds to an age of about 13.5 billion years, the highest ever measured for any galaxy. The observations were conducted as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) project, which uses NIRCam and NIRSpec to study the early universe in ways that were previously impossible.

The JADES project is only at the beginning and is busy over 80 astronomers from all over the globe. Next, the main focus will be to observe individual stars in those galaxies, some of which may have been born up to 100 million years earlier than Webb’s latest data suggest.

“With these measurements, we can learn about the intrinsic brightness of galaxies and figure out how many stars they have. We can now begin to really distinguish how galaxies are pulled together over time. The observations match what astronomers expected based on existing models of galaxy formation.

In the NIRCam observations, the team also identified galaxies that appear to be even older than currently confirmed onesbut the ages of those have not yet been verified by more accurate spectroscopic measurements than No hints of new discoveries will be presented Monday, Dec. 12 at a Space Telescope Science Institute conference in Baltimore.