Due to the expansion of the universe, the distance to the farthest galaxy is estimated to be 33 billion years.
republica.co.id, The Jakarta-James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has stunned the world with the deepest space image ever taken in the infrared spectrum. Now, the telescope is making another proud achievement, namely the possible discovery of the most distant galaxy ever observed.
reported from digital trends, Sunday (24/7/2022), preliminary data came from a survey called the GRISM Lens-Amplified Survey from Space, or GLASS, observing a galaxy cluster named Abell 2744 using the NIRCAM webcam and NIRISS and NIRSpec spectrographs . The purpose of this survey is to look at the early period after the Big Bang, called the era of reionization, when the first starlight shone on the universe.
It is possible to see very distant galaxies because the mass of Abell 2644 is so large that it bends space-time, acting as a magnifying glass for the faint galaxy behind it.
In the first data set from the Glass survey, researchers have identified two galaxies that have redshifts, meaning that their light is shifted very far in the infrared range, indicating that they are far away. The results show that we can see the two galaxies as they did 13.4 billion years ago.
“We can potentially see the light of the most distant star that no one has ever seen,” said lead author Rohan Naidu. AFP,
These results were collected with the NIRCam instrument, so they still need to be confirmed by further readings such as the spectroscopic results from NIRSpec. This paper has also not been peer reviewed, so the results should be considered speculative at this point until further confirmation is released. But the work provides an interesting picture of the results that can be achieved with James Webb.
The older galaxy, called GLASS-z13, may have originated in one of the earliest stages of the universe, within 300 million years after the Big Bang. If the results are confirmed, this would make it the most distant galaxy ever observed.
“Light from Glass-Z13 took 13.4 billion years to reach us, but due to the expansion of the universe, the distance between us is now 33 billion light years!” Physicist James O’Donoghue explained on Twitter. This research is available for viewing in the preprint archive arXiv,
