The James Webb Space Telescope has found a galaxy that existed 13.5 billion years ago, a scientist who analyzed the data said Wednesday.
Known as GLASS-z13, the galaxy dates back to 300 million years after the Big Bang, about 100 million years earlier than anything previously identified, said scientist Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics.
“We are potentially seeing the most distant starlight anyone has ever seen,” he said. The more distant objects are from us, the longer their light will take to reach us, so to look back into the distant universe is to see into the deep past.
Although GLASS-z13 existed in the earliest era of the Universe, its exact age is unknown, as it could have formed at any time within the first 300 million years.
GLASS-z13 was spotted in so-called “early release” data from the orbiting observatory’s main infrared imager, called NIRcam, but the discovery was not revealed in the first set of images released by NASA last week.
When translated from the infrared to the visible spectrum, the galaxy appears as a red patch with white in the center as part of a larger picture of the distant cosmos.
Naidu and his colleagues, a team of 25 astronomers from around the world, have submitted their findings to a scientific journal. It hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, but it has already thrown the global astronomical community into an uproar.
“The astronomical record is already falling apart and there are more unstable,” tweeted NASA Chief Scientist Thomas Zurbuchen. “Yes, I tend to applaud only once the science results in clear peer review. But this looks very promising,” he added.
Because these are so far from Earth, “by the time their light reaches us, it has been stretched out by the expansion of the universe and shifted into the infrared region of the light spectrum. Webb is equipped to detect all of that with unprecedented clarity,” said Zurbuchen.
