When did the first galaxies form?
The earliest galaxies found by the Hubble Space Telescope formed about 420 million years after the Big Bang. But that telescope was limited in how far it could see. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope is allowing astronomers to probe more distant galaxies by using infrared light that the Hubble telescope could not see.
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“James Webb is pushing past Hubble in terms of finding these oldest galaxies.”
“James Webb is pushing past Hubble in terms of finding these oldest galaxies,” Meredith Stone, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, says. The findings so far “defy models of galaxy formation that people had made before,” Stone adds. JWST has already identified a distant galaxy that formed only 330 million years after the Big Bang, and it’s likely that even earlier galaxies will still be discovered. “When exactly that first one formed is still an open question,” Stone says. “And as James Webb keeps observing, we’ll probably keep pushing that limit as we observe more of the sky.”
Stone chose to attend graduate school at the University of Arizona specifically because of the opportunity to work on the Webb telescope. “The group has been working on the telescope since its inception basically – two whole decades now,” she says. Like Alberts, she remembers the first time the team received data and images from the telescope, a million miles away from Earth. “It was this moment of, ‘Wow, everyone’s efforts that they’ve been putting in for years and years and years are finally paying off,” she says, bonding the astronomers forever in a shared sense of wonder that propels them forward every day.
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