James Webb Space Telescope Oldest Galaxy

The James Webb Space Telescope may have discovered a galaxy that existed 13 5 billion years ago, a scientist who examined the data claimed Wednesday, only a week after its initial images were made public. Known as Glass, the galaxy dates back to 300 million years after the Big Bang, about 100 million years earlier than anything previously identified.

 Since it takes longer for light from distant objects to get to us, looking back at the distant cosmos is like seeing deep into the past. Even though Glass said 13 was a part of the universe's early history, its precise age is still uncertain, since it may have originated at any point within the first 300 million years. The main infrared imagery of the orbiting observatory, dubbed Nearcam, picked up Glass said 13 in the So-called early release date, but the finding was not made public in the initial image set released by NASA last week. 

 25 astronomers from across the world, including Rohan Nydew of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, have collaborated to present their research. In a peer-reviewed publication, the group looked through this far-off universe's infrared data, looking for a unique signal of very far-off galaxies. All photons or energy packets are absorbed by the neutral hydrogen of the universe between the object and the observer under a certain infrared wavelength threshold. 

They were able to determine the locations of these photon dropoffs and infer the presence of these most distant galaxies by analyzing data gathered through several infrared filters directed at the same region of space. For instance, considering how soon after the Big Bang formed, the galaxy has a mass of a billion suns, which is probably quite shocking.