JWST catches rare glimpses of nascent galaxies from ancient universe

In a rare insight into the old galaxies from deep space, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) has given astronomers a bold new view into some never seen before cosmic spaces, after spending 32 days gazing into space.

As the JADES programme collected data team members Kevin Hainline and Ryan Endsley announced the discovery of hundreds of early galaxies at a news conference of the American Astronomical Society.

The team identified more than 700 galaxies at redshifts when the universe was just 600 million years old.

Hainline said: "The most distant of these — the farthest galaxy humans have ever seen — is spectroscopically confirmed to be at a redshift of 13, or just 200 million years after the Big Bang."

"This is important because we live in a universe of complexity, and the early universe was hydrogen, helium and light," Hainline added.

Now, 93% of the galaxies JWST is identifying are new, which were never seen before. "This is the rest of the iceberg," said Hainline.

The view obtained from millions of years in the past show how the cosmos unravelled where things were different.

Endsley explained: "About a sixth of early galaxies in the JADES sample is in the throes of star formation of a kind we don’t see in the nearby universe, marked by extremely bright emission at certain wavelengths."

"Stars within very early galaxies are forming in these super-compact clumps, forming hundreds, perhaps thousands of these very massive, young stars all at once, basically within the span of a couple millions of years."

According to the experts, small other galaxies with such emission suggest that individual clumps would light up with new stars and then rest for some time."

This “bursty” mode of star formation could explain the unexpectedly bright galaxies announced by other astronomers — they were simply looking at the galaxies fired up with unexpectedly intense star formation.

Endsley said that even as hot, massive newborn stars light up their galaxy, they're not necessarily associated with all that much mass.

"We're not really finding evidence of these over-massive objects within our JADES sample," he noted.

"I think that there are some really exciting examples of active supermassive black holes that people didn't necessarily expect to exist in this very early episode of the universe," Endsley added.

"It is something we really need to start taking into consideration as we move forward."