2 Oldest and Farthest Galaxies Found, Check Out the Search Techniques

CNN Indonesia

Monday, 27 Nov 2023 11:17 IWST

Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —

Two galaxy the oldest, with an age of 330 million years after the Big Bang, and the most distant range in the universe was discovered by astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

These ancient objects, which are thought to be the second and fourth most distant galaxies ever detected, are slightly below the earliest known galaxy, namely JADES-GS-z13-0.

The last galaxy previously seen by JWST was around 300 million years post-Big Bang. The light from these three very old galaxies traveled more than 13 billion years to reach the JWST lens.

“The light from these ancient galaxies is about three times older than Earth. Only through their light can we begin to understand the exotic physics that govern [galaksi] before the cosmic dawn (Big Bang, ed),” Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University and co-author of a new study on galaxies, was quoted as saying LiveScience.

Leja and co, in Education at IOP Science, detecting a newly discovered galaxy in a region of space called the Pandora Cluster, or Abell 2744a large galaxy cluster that has a mass equivalent to 4 trillion Suns.

Galaxy clusters are the most massive structures in the universe bound by gravity.

However, these two newly discovered ancient galaxies were not found within the cluster itself. They were discovered behind it, thanks to a natural magnification effect called gravitational lensing (gravitational lensing).

First predicted to exist by Albert Einstein, gravitational lensing occurs when an ultramassive object bends the space around it, bending and magnifying light passing nearby.

In JWST’s latest observations, the mass of the Pandora Cluster creates a gravitational lens strong enough to magnify the light of the two galaxies even though they are located billions of light years behind Pandora.

According to the researchers, this magnified view reveals that both ancient galaxies appear much larger than other galaxies observed at the same point in cosmic history.

In fact, the galaxies are large enough that researchers can see different shapes.

“Previously discovered galaxies at this distance are point sources; they appear as a point in our image,” said study lead author Bingjie Wang, a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State, in a statement.

“But one of the [foto] ours looked elongated, almost like beans, and the others looked like fuzzy balls.”

“It’s not clear whether these size differences are due to how the stars form or what happens to the stars after they form but the diversity of galaxy properties is really interesting,” added Wang.

These new galaxies join a growing list of very ancient objects detected by JWST.

Also recently, the telescope revealed the oldest active supermassive black hole in the universe, dating back about 450 million years to the Big Bang, as well as evidence of the oldest organic molecules, located in a cloud about 12.3 billion light years from Earth.

The new research was published November 13 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

(rfi/arh)