JWST has clicked a 'ghostly' space object

The James Webb Telescope, since its launch, has been humanity's most advanced 'eye in the sky'. The Hubble Space Telescope is still working and sending us images of the universe yes, but the addition of the James Webb Space Telescope has enabled us to view the universe in literally a new light.

The JWST has now clicked AzTECC71. This is a dusty star-forming galaxy. It is part of the early universe.

Although light has an incredible speed of about 300,000 kilometres per hour, the universe is so big that even light takes millions of years to reach us from very distant corners of space. And the fun thing is, the more we look farther into the universe, the more we look into the past.

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Before this, we could see AzTECC71 as a glowing blob in space through our ground-based telescopes. The galaxy then vanished from images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Now it has reappeared in images captured by JWST.

Observation points to new conclusions

AzTECC71 has been classified as a dusty, star-forming galaxy. This means that the galaxy is fast forming stars but is covered by a sort of dusty veil. The image that we have got is from about 1 billion years from the Big Bang.

It was thought previously that such galaxies were rare in the early years of the life of the universe. But it is now being suggested that they are more common than were thought before.

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“This thing is a real monster,” said Jed McKinney, a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Texas at Austin. McKinney was quoted by SciTechDaily.

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“Even though it looks like a little blob, it’s actually forming hundreds of new stars every year. And the fact that even something that extreme is barely visible in the most sensitive imaging from our newest telescope is so exciting to me. It’s potentially telling us there’s a whole population of galaxies that have been hiding from us.”

If the conclusion drawn from the observations is accurate, it would mean that the universe, in its younger days, was much dustier than initially thought.

As reported by SciTechDaily, the study has been published inThe Astrophysical Journal.

(With input from agencies)