33 billion light-years from Earth, the Weber Space Telescope discovers two galaxies in the second / fourth distance.
CTOnews.com, November 15-with the help of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have observed galaxies UNCOVER Zmi 13 and UNCOVER Zmi 12, the second and fourth most distant galaxies ever recorded.
The two galaxies are located in the Pandora Cluster (Pandora's Cluster,Abell 2744), one of 60,000 light sources in the cluster that were captured in the first deep-field images taken by JWST in 2022.
An international team of researchers led by researchers at Pennsylvania State University followed up on deep-field images of the region (pictured below), using new spectral data provided by JWST-information about the light emitted from the entire electromagnetic spectrum-to identify the distances of these ancient galaxies and infer their properties.
CTOnews.com Note: the paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal Newsletter (Astrophysical Journal Letters) on November 13.
Because the light from these galaxies takes a long journey to reach Earth, it provides us with a window into the past. The team estimates that the light detected by JWST was emitted by the two galaxies when the universe was about 330 million years old and traveled about 13.4 billion light-years to reach JWST. But the researchers say that due to the expansion of the universe during this period, the two galaxies are now nearly 33 billion light-years from Earth.
"the light emitted by these galaxies is very old, about three times the age of Earth," said Joel Leja, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University and a member of the UNCOVER team. "these early galaxies were like lighthouses, passing through the thin hydrogen gas that made up the early universe. Only through their light can we begin to understand the strange physics that dominated galaxies near the dawn of the universe."
