The telescope James Webb was able to detect the light coming from two galaxies – among the very first in the early universe – between 350 and 450 million years ago after the Big Bang.
These are the results of the analysis of observations of the very distant galaxy cluster Abell 2744 and of two regions of the sky adjacent to it, carried out by the powerful space telescope between 28 and 29 June as part of the project Glass-Jwst Early Release Science Program.
“This work highlights the ability of this telescope to select sources in the era of the so-called ‘cosmic dawn’. No less important is the fact of having found, among others, two brilliant sources in a relatively small area,” he says Castilian frameINAF researcher in Rome and first author of the article describing the search for these two very distant galaxies, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“Based on our predictions, we thought we would have to probe a much larger volume of space to find such galaxies. Instead, the results seem to indicate that the number of bright galaxies is much greater than expected, perhaps due to a greater efficiency of star formation”.
Fruit of the collaboration of NASA with ESA (the European Space Agency) and the CSA (the Canadian Space Agency), the James Webb space telescope is the largest, most complex and most expensive – around ten billion dollars – ever built by man. It took off on Christmas Day 2021 from Europe’s Kourou Spaceport in French Guiana atop an Ariane 5 rocket.