The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a peculiar galaxy named GS-NDG-9422, existing just one billion years after the Big Bang. This galaxy's gas outshines its stars, potentially revealing a missing link in galactic evolution.
The James Webb Space Telescope has found a bizarre galaxy in the early universe whose gas outshines its stars, marking it out as a possible missing link in galactic evolution.
"My first thought in looking at the galaxy's spectrum was, 'that's weird,' which is exactly what the Webb telescope was designed to reveal: totally new phenomena in the early universe that will help us understand how the cosmic story began," lead researcher Alex Cameron, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, said in a statement.
Astronomers also aren't certain of the types of stars that formed in the early universe, or the time they took to ignite. Yet, as the only material emitted by the Big Bang was hydrogen and helium, the original, primordial stars are thought to have been extremely large, very bright and incredibly hot.
To search for evidence of the earliest stars, the researchers pointed the JWST at an extremely distant region of the sky. Light travels at a fixed speed through the vacuum of space; this means that the deeper we look into the universe, the further back in time we see as we detect light coming from ever more remote sources.
James Webb Telescope Galaxy Evolution Early Universe Star Formation Bizarre Celestial Object
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