Early Galaxy Formations

Subject: Science and technology

Section: Space Technology

Concept :

In a new study, an international team of astrophysicists has discovered several mysterious objects hiding in images from the James Webb Space Telescope: six potential galaxies that emerged so early in the universe’s history.
The telescope made observations of a population of candidate massive galaxies that formed around 500-700 million years after the Big Bang .
These galaxies are more massive than have been expected for this early point in time.
These observations offer insights into early galaxy formation.
If verified with spectroscopy, these findings provide evidence to suggest that galaxies grew quicker than expected early in the history of the Universe.
Spectroscopy is the scientific study of the interaction between matter and electromagnetic radiation.
It involves the analysis of the way in which different types of radiation (such as visible light, X-rays, and radio waves) interact with matter, such as atoms and molecules.

James Webb Space Telescope

The telescope is the result of an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency which was launched in December 2021.
It is currently at a point in space known as the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, approximately 1.5 million km beyond Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
- The Lagrange Point 2 is one of the five points in the orbital plane of the Earth-Sun system.
- Named after Italian-French mathematician Josephy-Louis Lagrange, the points are in any revolving two-body system like Earth and Sun, marking where the gravitational forces of the two large bodies cancel each other out.
Objects placed at these positions are relatively stable and require minimal external energy or fuel to keep themselves there, and so many instruments are positioned here.
It’s the largest, most powerful infrared space telescope ever built.
It’s the successor to Hubble Telescope.
It can see backwards in time to just after the Big Bang by looking for galaxies that are so far away that the light has taken many billions of years to get from those galaxies to our telescopes.