NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Captures Over 45,000 Galaxies

The James Webb Space Telescope of NASA has captured a stunning photo that features more than 45,000 galaxies. The image was taken as part of a science program aimed at exploring faint and distant galaxies. According to NASA, the universe was filled with opaque fog after the big bang took place. But this fog did not vanish even hundreds of millions of years later. To investigate the reason behind this, the James Webb telescope peered into the galaxies from the Epoch of Reionization or the period when the stars and galaxies arrived in the universe.

The scientists observed that the galaxies from this period had “unusually strong signatures indicating intense bursts of star formation”. It is believed that the hot and bright stars may have emitted ultraviolet light which helped transform the “gas from opaque to transparent by ionising the atoms”.

The picture taken by the JWST was part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), a program that has so far discovered hundreds of galaxies that are from the period when the universe was less than 600 million years old. According to NASA, the image shows a portion of the sky which is called the GOODS-South. It has been studied by the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories.

The JADES program also involves the study of galaxies from when the universe was less than 400 million years old. Such studies help astronomers know how the formation of stars in the early years after the big bang was different from those formed today. The light emitted from distant galaxies is stretched to longer wavelengths and appears redder due to a phenomenon called redshift. Measuring this redshift can give astronomers an idea about how far and old the galaxy is.

Before the JWST was employed, only a few down such galaxies were spotted that had a redshift of above 8.