Has Webb telescope found oldest galaxy in known universe? Here's what expert has to say

The American space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), recently released the first full-colour and high-resolution pictures taken from the James Webb Space Telescope. The stunning images were a testament to what humanity is capable of. NASA drew back the curtain on billions of years of cosmic evolution.

Now, the images are being analysed by experts and scientists. In the latest development, a scientist who analyzed the data from James Webb said on Wednesday (July 20) that the telescope may have found a galaxy that existed 13.5 billion years ago.

Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics told news agency AFP that the collection of stars – called GLASS-z13 is a galaxy that apparently dates back to 300 million years after the Big Bang.

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It means about 100 million years earlier than anything previously identified. The previous oldest galaxy, known as GN-Z11, was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope.

As quoted by AFP, Naidu said, "We're potentially looking at the most distant starlight that anyone has ever seen."

"We found two very compelling candidates for extremely distant galaxies. If these galaxies are at the distance we think they are, the universe is only a few hundred million years old at that point," he said while speaking to New Scientist.

Notably, the more distant objects are from us, the longer it takes for their light to reach us. So in order to look back into the distant universe is to see into the deep past.

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Though GLASS-z13 existed in the earliest era of the universe, its exact age remains unknown as it could have formed anytime within the first 300 million years.

It s understood that the GLASS-z13 was spotted in data from the orbiting observatory's main infrared imager, called NIRcam. The discovery was, however, not revealed in the first image set published by NASA last week.

When translated from infrared into the visible spectrum, the galaxy appears as a blob of red with white in its centre.

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