How JWST’s Glances Back in Time Are Reshaping Cosmology
I am well pleased that I live in a time when we have to say “space” as a descriptor for some of our telescopes. Is that 13.475 billion YO galaxy still shining bright, or have its fires joined the depths of night?
December 16, 2022 at 7:00 am
BALTIMORE — The James Webb Space Telescope is living up to its promise as a wayback machine. The spectacularly sensitive observatory is finding and confirming galaxies more distant, and therefore existing earlier in the universe’s history, than any seen before.
The telescope, also known as JWST, has confirmed extreme distances to four galaxies, one of which sets a record for cosmic remoteness by shining about 13.475 billion years ago, astronomers reported December 12 at the First Science Results from JWST conference. Dozens of other galaxies may have been spotted as they were just 550 million years or less after the Big Bang, meaning the light from those galaxies traveled at least 13.1 billion years before reaching the telescope.
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