The powerful James Webb Space Telescope was able to find the faintest galaxy that has ever been discovered and one of the farthest galaxies ever observed.
Ultra-Faint Galaxy
The ultra-faint galaxy, dubbed JD1, is roughly 13.3 billion light years away. Live Science reports that this galaxy was born a few million years after the Big Bang.
During this period, the universe was filled with a fog that was pitch-black. Even light was not capable of passing through it. Hence, galaxies such as JD1 were crucial for the gloom to be burned away.
The light of this galaxy left its source back when the universe was still an infant. More specifically, it was back when the universe was roughly 4% of its present age. Space.com reports that this specific era of the early universe is referred to as the "epoch of reionization," which is when stars first came to be and brought the universe out of the darkness.
To know more about the earlier stirrings of galaxy JD1, the authors made use of the JWST to examine a gravitationally lensed shot of the galaxy in the near-infrared and infrared light spectra. Interesting Engineering adds that the galaxy cluster's gravitational pull made JD1 look bigger and 13 times brighter.
Doing so enabled them to know JD1's age, element composition, distance from Earth, and estimated number of star formations. They were also able to make a trace of the structure, which is a glob that is built from three primary spurs of dust and gas that birth stars.
Galaxies of the Early Universe
The novel findings were detailed in the Nature journal. Tommaso Treu, a co-author of the study and a physics and astronomy professor from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), explains in a statement that prior to switching the JWST on, they could not dream of detecting such an ultra-faint galaxy. Professor Treu adds that the mix of the JWST and gravitational lensing is quite a revolution.
Guido Roberts-Borsani, the study's first author and an astronomer from UCLA, explains that most of the galaxies that were found using the JWST are bright and rare galaxies that are not thought to represent the young galaxies that filled the early universe. Roberts-Borsani adds that, though this is important, they are not perceived to be the primary agents that burned away the fog.
However, ultra-faint galaxies like JD1 are more prevalent. For this reason, the researchers think that such galaxies are more suitable representatives for galaxies that moved with reionization.
Moving forward, the astronomers are set on using the method to uncover more early galaxies and shed light on how they functioned simultaneously to cover the cosmos in light.
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