Photos of Two of the Farthest Known Galaxies Shared

As humanity’s efforts to explore space continue, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope continues to offer us new discoveries. The last of these discoveries were two galaxies 33 billion light years away. These galaxies, two of the most distant ever discovered, are so far away that they may have vanished thousands of years before we can see them.

Two of the most distant galaxies

Astronomers at Penn State used James Webb’s skills to detect celestial objects beyond the Pandora star cluster, located 3.5 billion light-years from our planet. At the end of this study, the second and fourth farthest galaxies discovered to date were imaged.

Researcher Bingjie Wang, who continues his studies at Penn State and is part of the JWST UNCOVER team, emphasized the importance of discovering ancient galaxies in his statement. “We know so little about the early universe, the only way to learn about that period and test our theories about early galaxy formation and evolution is to use these very distant galaxies,” Wang said. he said.

The appearance of these two galaxies is slightly different from other ancient galaxies. One of the galaxies looks like a shelled peanut, and the other looks like a shiny ball. The fact that early galaxies could have such different structures raises some questions. It is estimated that these galaxies emerged 330 million years after the first moments of the universe. Since then, the light coming from these galaxies has made a journey of 13.4 billion years. The reason why galaxies are 33 billion light years away is that the universe is also expanding. You can think of it as the chocolate chips on a rising cake moving away from each other as the cake rises.

Researchers show that both galaxies contain very little metal and are rapidly forming new stars. This is seen as a finding that supports the Big Bang theory.

The research was published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.