Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered two of the oldest and most distant galaxies in the known universe; They date back only 330 million years after the Big Bang. Presumed to be the second and fourth most distant galaxies ever discovered, these ancient objects fall just short of the oldest known galaxy, JADES-GS-z13-0, previously detected by JWST around 300 million years after dawn. Light from all three of these extremely old galaxies has traveled more than 13 billion years to reach the JWST lens.

“The light from these galaxies is very old, about three times as old as Earth,” Joel Ledge, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and co-author of the new galaxy study, said in a statement. said. “Only through their light can we begin to understand the exotic physics that governs the world. [галактиками] near the cosmic dawn”.

According to NASA, Leia and her colleagues discovered the newly discovered galaxies in a region of space called the Pandora cluster, or Abell 2744, a massive galaxy cluster containing a mass equivalent to 4 trillion suns.

Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe. However, the two newly discovered older galaxies were not detected in the cluster itself; They were detected behind the cluster thanks to a natural magnifying effect called gravitational lensing. First predicted by Albert Einstein, gravitational lensing occurs when a supermassive object bends the space around it, bending and magnifying the light passing by it.

In the new JWST observations, the mass of the Pandora cluster has created a gravitational lens strong enough to magnify the light of the two galaxies, even though they are billions of light-years beyond Pandora.

This magnified image shows that the two ancient galaxies appear significantly larger than other galaxies observed at the same point in cosmic history, the researchers wrote. In fact, the galaxies were large enough for researchers to distinguish different shapes.

“At these distances, galaxies previously discovered are point sources; they appear like dots in our images,” the study’s lead author, Binji Wang, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. “But one of ours is elongated, almost looking like a peanut, and the other one looks like a ball of fluff.”

“It’s not clear whether the difference in size is related to how stars form or what happens to them after they form, but the variation in the properties of galaxies is really interesting,” Wang said. he added.

The new galaxies join a growing list of extremely old objects discovered by JWST. The telescope recently discovered the oldest active supermassive black hole in the known universe, dating back to about 450 million years after the Big Bang, as well as the oldest evidence of organic molecules in a cloud some 12.3 billion light-years away. Soil.