Take a Look at the Universe’s Youngest Galaxies!

For the first time, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured the formation of some of the universe’s youngest galaxies, and astrophysicists investigated them to elucidate the earliest days of the cosmos.

“These galaxies are like sparkling islands in a sea of otherwise neutral, opaque gas,” explains study co-author Kasper Heintz, an assistant professor of astrophysics at the Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. “Without Webb, we would not be able to observe these very early galaxies, let alone learn so much about their formation.”

The three galaxies spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope took shape between 400 and 600 million years ago – the universe is believed to be 13.8 billion years old – meaning that they formed not long after the Big Bang on a cosmic scale. They are almost exclusively surrounded by hydrogen and helium, the first two elements to form at the beginning of the universe. The oldest known galaxies formed between 300 and 400 million years after the Big Bang. “You could say that these are the first ‘direct’ images of galaxy formation that we’ve ever seen.”