Once again the James Webb space telescope confirms in the most solemn way its power and capabilities. Until now, few galaxies have been identified that belong to the first generation of galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, the mysterious phenomenon that gave birth to the Universe.
Since its first day of operation a year ago, James Webb has among other things revealed hundreds of ancient galaxies that could be among the first members of the Universe, helping scientists to extract valuable information about both the existence and evolution of galaxies and the existence and evolution of the Universe.
With an announcement from the research team, they present the discovery of 717 primordial galaxies made with the help of course by James Webb. These are galaxies that belong to the first generation of galaxies that already existed only 600 million years after the Big Bang. As it happened with other ancient galaxies discovered by James Webb, they also surprise scientists with their large size, the number of stars and, in general, their complexity. Until recently cosmologists believed that the conditions that existed in the childhood Universe allowed the existence of small simplistic in structure and characteristics galaxies that possessed a small number of also small in size and simple in composition stars something that has also been refuted by the observations of James Webb.
The discovery of the hundreds of galaxies is part of an international collaboration called the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), and the researchers identified them by studying images and data recorded by James Webb from one region of space in the constellation Ursa Minor and another in the direction of the Kaminos galaxy cluster.
“If you take the entire Universe and condense it into a two-hour movie, you see the first five minutes of the movie. These are the galaxies that start the process of creating the elements and complexity we see in the world around us today,” says Kevin Heinlein, a researcher at the Steward Observatory in Arizona who led the research team. The galaxies identified by the researchers reveal evidence of the evolution of the Universe when it was only 350 million years old and for the next 300 million years, a time period for which our knowledge of cosmic processes is limited.
