James Webb Space Telescope spots what may be the most distant galaxy yet found
CBSN
The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a remote, reddish galaxy shining just 350 million years after the birth of the cosmos 13.8 billion years ago, surprising astronomers who are struggling to figure out how stars and galaxies could have formed so rapidly in the wake of the Big Bang, researchers said Thursday.
"These observations just make your head explode," Paola Santini, a co-author of a paper describing the discovery in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement. "This is a whole new chapter in astronomy. It's like an archaeological dig, and suddenly you find a lost city or something you didn't know about. It's just staggering."
No one yet knows when the first stars turned on after the so-called "dark ages" ended and light first began to travel freely through the universe. But "I think anything earlier than 100 million years would just be really weird," Garth Illingworth, a Webb astronomer and professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, told reporters.
