Sharmila Kuthunur is a Seattle-based science journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics and space exploration. Follow her on X @skuthunur.
have found what they say are three of our universe's earliest galaxies, spotted actively forming when the cosmos was just 400 million to 600 million years old.
In the JWST's images, this galactic trio resembles fuzzy red smudges feeding on nearby helium and hydrogen.Over millions of years, it is these elements that sustain such galaxies as they grow, helping to shape them into the familiar ellipses and spirals we see across the cosmos.."Whereas James Webb has previously shown us early galaxies at later stages of evolution, here we witness their very birth, and thus, the construction of the first star systems in the universe.
"This is the process that we see the beginning of in our observations," study co-author Darach Watson said in the university statement.
"It is a process that we'll investigate further, until hopefully, we are able to fit even more pieces of the puzzle together," said study co-author Gabriel Brammer of DAWN.is reaching beyond its primary mission goals."Images and data of these distant galaxies were impossible to obtain before Webb," he said."Plus, we had a good sense of what we were going to find when we first glimpsed the data – we were almost making discoveries by eye.
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