James Webb Space Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a handful of possible galaxies that could be among the earliest to ever exist.

Located 13.6 billion light-years away and just 200 million years after the Big Bang, the five galaxy candidates are the earliest ever detected, and likely some of the first to have formed in the ancient universe.

If confirmed by follow-up observations, the ancient galaxies will offer astronomers a test of their best theories of galaxy formation along with unique insights into how matter first coalesced across the cosmos. The researchers published their findings Nov. 26 on the preprint database arXiv, so they have not yet been peer-reviewed.

"According to the standard paradigm of structure formation, the same primordial fluctuations that gave rise to hot and cold spots in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will eventually grow, collapse, and form the first galaxies during cosmic dawn, ushering in the epoch of first light," the researchers wrote in their study.

"These first galaxies have remained outside of our observational reach for decades," they added. Yet the JWST has changed that.

Cosmologists previously estimated that the first clumps of stars began to merge and form galaxies just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang...........


https://www.livescience.com/space/c...covered a handful,the earliest to ever exist.