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Webb telescope may have already found most distant known galaxy
Known as GLASS-z13, the galaxy dates back to 300 million years after the Big Bang, about 100 million years earlier than anything previously identified, Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics told AFP.
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In this handout photo from NASA obtained on July 11, 2022, the first infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is seen. (AFP/NASA)
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ust a week after its first images were shown to the world, the James Webb Space Telescope may have found a galaxy that existed 13.5 billion years ago, a scientist who analyzed the data said Wednesday.
Known as GLASS-z13, the galaxy dates back to 300 million years after the Big Bang, about 100 million years earlier than anything previously identified, Rohan Naidu of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics told AFP.
"We're potentially looking at the most distant starlight that anyone has ever seen," he said.
The more distant objects are from us, the longer it takes for their light to reach us, and so to gaze back into the distant universe is to see into the deep past.
Though GLASS-z13 existed in the earliest era of the universe, its exact age remains unknown as it could have formed anytime within the first 300 million years.
GLASS-z13 was spotted in so-called "early release" data from the orbiting observatory's main infrared imager, called NIRcam -- but the discovery was not revealed in the first image set published by NASA last week.
When translated from infrared into the visible spectrum, the galaxy appears as a blob of red with white in its center, as part of a wider image of the distant cosmos called a "deep field."
