NASA's James Webb Clicks Thousands Of Galaxies In One Frame As It Maps Birth Of Universe

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has released one of the most incredible pictures. The image shows more than 45,000 galaxies in the portion of the sky called GOODS-Sout. The image was captured as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey program.

According to the space agency, the JADES program will devote about 32 days of telescope time to uncover and characterize faint, distant galaxies. While the data is still coming in, JADES already has discovered hundreds of galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 600 million years old. The team also has identified galaxies sparkling with a multitude of young, hot stars.

Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona in Tucson, co-lead of the JADES program said, "With JADES, we want to answer a lot of questions, like: How did the earliest galaxies assemble themselves? How fast did they form stars? Why do some galaxies stop forming stars?"

Ryan Endsley of the University of Texas at Austin led an investigation into galaxies that existed 500 to 850 million years after the big bang. For hundreds of millions of years after the big bang, the universe was filled with a gaseous fog that made it opaque to energetic light. By one billion years after the big bang, the fog had cleared and the universe became transparent, a process known as reionization. Scientists have debated whether active, supermassive black holes or galaxies full of hot, young stars were the primary cause of reionization, the space agency said.

The team of researchers found evidence that these young galaxies underwent periods of rapid star formation interspersed with quiet periods where fewer stars formed. These fits and starts may have occurred as galaxies captured clumps of the gaseous raw materials needed to form stars. Alternatively, since massive stars quickly explode, they may have injected energy into the surrounding environment periodically, preventing gas from condensing to form new stars.

According to a press release by NASA, another element of the JADES program involves the search for the earliest galaxies that existed when the universe was less than 400 million years old. By studying these galaxies, astronomers can explore how star formation in the early years after the big bang was different from what is seen in current times.

Kevin Hainline of the University of Arizona in Tucson and his colleagues used Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument to obtain these measurements, called photometric redshifts and identified more than 700 candidate galaxies that existed when the universe was between 370 million and 650 million years old.

"Previously, the earliest galaxies we could see just looked like little smudges. And yet those smudges represent millions or even billions of stars at the beginning of the universe," said Hainline. "Now, we can see that some of them are actually extended objects with visible structures. We can see groupings of stars being born only a few hundred million years after the beginning of time."

"We're finding star formation in the early universe is much more complicated than we thought," added Rieke.

These results are being reported at the 242nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Albuquerque, New Mexico.