James Webb telescope clicks four most distant galaxies ever seen by astronomers

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been sending a flood of information and images since it became operational last year. We had good ol' Hubble Space Telescope faithfully revolving around Earth of course. But thanks to JWST and all the cutting-edge tech it packs within it, we are crossing new frontiers.

JWST has done it again! It has found four most distant galaxies ever observed. One of them was formed just 320 million years after The Big Bang. This number may look huge but on cosmic scale, it's small enough in order to be just two per cent of current age of the Universe.

By the time light from the most distant galaxies reaches Earth, it has been stretched by the expansion of the universe and shifted to the infrared region of the light spectrum.

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The Webb telescope's NIRCam instrument has an unprecedented ability to detect this infrared light, allowing it to quickly spot a range of never-before-seen galaxies -- some of which could reshape astronomers' understanding of the early universe.

In two studies published in the Nature Astronomy journal, astronomers revealed they have "unambiguously detected" the four most distant galaxies ever observed.

Stephane Charlot, a researcher at the Astrophysics Institute of Paris and co-author of the two new studies, told AFP that the farthest galaxy -- called JADES-GS-z13-0 -- formed 320 million years after the Big Bang.

That is the greatest distance ever observed by astronomers, he said.

The Webb telescope also confirmed the existence of JADES-GS-z10-0, which dates from 450 million years after the Big Bang and had previously been spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope.

All four galaxies are "very low in mass," weighing roughly a hundred million solar masses, Charlot said. The Milky Way, in comparison, weighs 1.5 trillion solar masses by some estimations.

But the galaxies are "very active in star formation in proportion to their mass," Charlot said.

(With inputs from agencies)

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