In what may be one of the most incredible images ever acquired by the James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s most powerful observatory has surveyed a patch of sky and discovered a galaxy-packed star factory.
The image obtained as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey program depicts a portion of the GOODS-South region of the sky, which contains over 45,000 galaxies per frame. The Hubble telescope has also previously observed this region of the heavens.
The JADES program will dedicate approximately 32 days of telescope time to discovering and characterizing dim, faraway galaxies as astronomers attempt to comprehend their nature. How did the first nebulae and stars originate?
The researchers studied 500–850 million-year-old galaxies.
“With JADES, we hope to resolve numerous queries, such as: How did the earliest galaxies form? How quickly did stars form? Why do some galaxies cease star formation?” Rieke of the University of Arizona stated.
The team examined galaxies that existed between 500 and 850 million years after the big bang, when the universe was in its infancy and the region was filled with a gaseous haze that made it opaque to energetic radiation. About a billion years after the Big Bang, this atmosphere dissipated and the universe became transparent.
Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument, astronomers searched for signatures of star formation in the universe’s early epoch and discovered that they were abundant at the time.
These primordial galaxies experienced periods of accelerated star formation.
“Nearly every galaxy we discover exhibits these atypically powerful emission line signatures, indicating intense recent star formation.” The investigation’s leader, Ryan Endsley of the University of Texas, remarked that these early galaxies were excellent at generating enormous, blazing stars.
In addition, the team discovered that these early galaxies experienced periods of rapid star formation interspersed with periods of reduced star formation.
“Before, the earliest galaxies we could see appeared as mere smudges. Nevertheless, these smudges represent millions or even billions of stars at the start of the universe.
Currently, we can see that some of them are in fact extended objects with visible structures.
Only a few hundred million years after the beginning of time, we can see groups of stars forming, according to Kevin Hainline of the University of Arizona.