TUCSON, AZ — New images from the James Webb Space Telescope reportedly show galaxies further back in time than ever seen before.
Webb scientists, including researchers from the University of Arizona, say the images contain galaxies dating back to about 300 million years after the Big Bang. That would make them the most distant galaxies ever discovered.
The team has confirmed the galaxies' ages with spectra that place them unquestionably farther than any previously known galaxies.
While the galaxies are some of the oldest ever discovered, they appear to be the newest to us because of how much time it takes for their light to reach Earth.
The JWST continues to improve on achievements made with older telescopes. The oldest galaxies discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope date back to between 400 and 500 million years after the Big Bang.
The University of Arizona-based team that built the Near Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, onboard Webb partnered with the European Space Agency's Near Infrared Spectrograph, or NIRSpec, team in 2015 to form the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, collaboration.
The instrument teams proposed JADES as a program that would provide a view of the early universe unprecedented in both depth and detail.
During the first round of JADES observation, an area of the sky called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was surveyed. This area has been studied by nearly all large telescopes, giving scientists an already detailed picture of what this part of space is like.
After observations from the JWST, the team identified four of the galaxies to be from an unprecedentedly early time in the universe's history, breaking new ground for the study of galaxies.
