Astronomers from the University of Missouri have used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Observations and discovered 87 galaxies that could be the earliest known galaxies in the universe.
The finding moves the astronomers one step closer to finding out when galaxies first appeared in the universe — about 200-400 million years after the Big Bang.
“Finding such a large number of galaxies in the early parts of the universe suggests that we might need to revise our previous understanding of galaxy formation,” Haojing Yan from the University of Missouri said in a release. “Our finding gives us the first indication that a lot of galaxies could have been formed in the universe much earlier than previously thought.”
In the study, the astronomers searched for potential galaxies at “very high redshifts.” The concept of redshifts in astronomy allows astronomers to measure how far away distant objects are in the universe such as galaxies by looking at how the colours change in the waves of light that they emit.
