JWST Finds Galaxies Just 300-400 Million Years After the Big Bang, and It's Just Getting Started - by spacewriter
GL-z13 is a galaxy in the early universe that appears as seen by JWST when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. Courtesy: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
These galaxies exist at a time that has been, until now, largely unexplored. So, a consortium of astronomers proposed a JWST search for luminous galaxies in the first several hundred million years after the Big Bang . This work was done as part of the JWST Early Release program and the exploration will likely continue for quite some time.
The search revealed that the two galaxies—GL-z11 and GL-z13—are likely billion-solar-mass galaxies. That’s pretty remarkable given their presence in the early Universe, especially since the first stars began forming around one to two hundred million years after the Big Bang. These galaxies are also bright enough that astronomers will be able to do follow-up spectrographic studies to determine more about them.
Based on the early observations with JWST, it seems very likely GL-z11 and GL-z13 have a population of hot, young stars , and that each galaxy could be bursting with star-formation regions. These stars and regions should be very good candidates for follow-up observations using JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph. in addition, further spectral studies of these distant galaxies should help astronomers pin down precise ages.
So, if these two galaxy discoveries are any indication, JWST is about to explode our view of the infant Universe the same way HST did with its deep field observations. Of course, astronomers will work to confirm these galaxies spectroscopically. And, if what they promise plays out across the sky—with the discovery of at least two galaxies at redshifts between 11 and 13 in every direction JWST looks—then we’ll be in for some interesting times.
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