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An international team of astronomers has discovered the oldest and most distant galaxies yet confirmed

An international team of astronomers has discovered the oldest and most distant galaxies yet confirmed using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope captured the light emitted by these galaxies more than 13.4 billion years ago, meaning the galaxies date back to less than 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 2% of its current age. Initial observations from JWST yielded several candidate galaxies at extreme distances, as did earlier observations with the Hubble Space Telescope. Now, four of these targets have been confirmed by obtaining long spectroscopic observations that not only provide reliable measurements of their distances, but also allow astronomers to characterize the physical properties of the galaxies.

“We discovered galaxies at fantastically early times in the distant universe,” said Brant Robertson, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “With JWST, we can now find galaxies this far away for the first time and then confirm spectroscopically that they are indeed that far away.” Astronomers measure the distance to a galaxy by determining its redshift. Due to the expansion of the universe, distant objects appear to be moving away from us and their light is stretched to longer, redder wavelengths by the Doppler effect. Photometric techniques based on images captured through various filters can provide redshift estimates, but definitive measurements require spectroscopy, which separates light from an object into its sub-wavelengths.

The new findings focus on four galaxies with redshifts higher than 10. The two galaxies originally observed by Hubble have now been confirmed to have redshifts of 10.38 and 11.58. The two most distant galaxies, both detected in the JWST images, have redshifts of 13.20 and 12.63, making them the most distant galaxies confirmed by spectroscopy to date. A redshift of 13.2 corresponds to about 13.5 billion years ago.

“They are far beyond what we could have imagined we would find before JWST,” Robertson said. “At a redshift of 13, the universe is only about 325 million years old.” Robertson and Emma Curtis-Lake of the University of Hertfordshire (U.K.) will present the new findings on Dec. 12 at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conference in Baltimore on the topic “First science results from JWST.” They are the lead authors of two results articles that have not yet gone through the peer review process.

The observations are the result of a collaboration between scientists who led the development of two instruments aboard Webb, the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). The research of the faintest and oldest galaxies was the main motivation in the conception of these instruments. In 2015, the instrument teams came together to design the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), an ambitious program allocated just over one month of the telescope’s time and designed to provide a view of the early universe unprecedented at both depths. and detail. JADES is an international collaboration of more than eighty astronomers from ten countries.

“These results are the culmination of why the NIRCam and NIRSpec teams came together to conduct this observing program,” said Marcia Rieke, NIRCam principal investigator at the University of Arizona. The JADES program began with NIRCam and used more than 10 mission days to observe a small portion of the sky in and around the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Astronomers have been studying this region for more than 20 years with almost all large telescopes.

 The JADES team observed the field at nine different infrared wavelength ranges and captured stunning images that reveal nearly 100,000 distant galaxies, each billions of light-years away. The team then used the NIRSpec spectrograph for a single three-day observing period to collect light from 250 faint galaxies. This provided precise redshift measurements and revealed the properties of the gas and stars in these galaxies.

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