Almost a week after the publication of the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) discovered in the collected data a galaxy that already existed more than 13.5 billion years ago. This galaxy, GLASS-z13, was formed when 300 million years had not yet elapsed since the Big Bang, about 100 million years older than the previous owner of the title of the most distant and oldest known galaxy.
Interestingly, the GLASS-z13 galaxy was discovered in one of the very first data packages obtained by the NIRcam telescope’s main infrared camera. But since this discovery needed further verification and confirmation, it was not announced at the time of publication of the first series of images.
The image shows the GLASS-z13 galaxy as a red “blob” with an almost white center, which corresponds to different wavelengths in the infrared range. Unfortunately, the exact distance to this galaxy remains an unknown quantity, it could have formed at any time during the first 300 million years of the universe.
Astronomers who made this discovery plan to perform a spectrographic analysis of light from the GLASS-z13 galaxy in the future, and this will allow to calculate the distance to it with a fairly high accuracy. Moreover, the galaxy has a mass equal to about a billion solar masses, and scientists hope in the future to get an answer to the question of how this could form in such a short period of time.
And in conclusion, it should be noted that the astronomical community has great expectations for the James Webb telescope’s ability to detect the most distant and ancient objects in the universe. This ability stems from the fact that light, passing through vast distances, shifts into the red region due to the expansion of the universe and into the infrared region of the spectrum, where the James Webb telescope can view it all with unprecedented clarity.
