Researchers are convinced the James Webb Space Telescope has glimpsed an unexpected population of galaxies in the early universe. Now they’re trying to decide what this means for our understanding of the cosmos
In their quest to understand the first stars and galaxies that lit up the cosmos, astronomers are still in the dark—but getting closer to enlightenment one discovery at a time.
Astronomers have meanwhile since found several other early galaxy candidates, some seemingly as far back as 200 million years post–big bang. Prior to the launch of JWST, no one knew if galaxies could even form so early in the universe’s 13.8-billion-year history, at a time when matter was thought to still be sedately coalescing into the gravitationally bound clumps required to give birth to large groups of stars.
Such an unorthodox situation could also easily lead to more rapid star formation in the early universe, perhaps as a result of dark matter halos pulling in matter more quickly to feed such growth. Today our galaxy produces roughly one new star per year, but Castellano’s paper suggests that star-formation rates must have been at least 20 times higher in his and Naidu’s two candidate galaxies.
Such follow-up observations are set to begin imminently. Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology is part of a team that has been approved time on JWST to follow up a handful of early galaxy candidates found in the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, for which Kartaltepe is a leading investigator. Such candidates are distinguished by their high redshifts—a stretching out of the wavelengths of their light caused by the expansion of the universe across cosmic time.
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