Generally, we are all a nosy bunch. Since 1950 many people have loved being flies on the walls in Ambridge to hear the drama and gossip of several families in The Archers that don’t actually exist. The genealogical roots of many celebrities have been investigated with a fine tooth comb over the years in “Who do you think you are?” and some amazing discoveries have come to light. Who would have thought that comedian Josh Widdecombe was descended from Henry VIII?
Us humans get excited looking back only several hundred years to our origins on this small third rock from the bright Sun. Even though light is extremely fast and the laws of physics say nothing can exceed this speed limit of 186,000 miles per second, it still takes around 8 minutes 20 seconds for sunlight to reach our planet. So we are always seeing objects in space in a time delay as it takes varying times for the light from them to get to us depending on their distance. On a much larger scale, the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has looked way further into the Universe with phenomenal success. It is detecting light from objects that set out billions of years ago so is seeing further back in time than we have ever done before.
When it first took its 12.5 hour long exposure deep field image which covers a patch of sky about the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length, this amazing telescope discovered plenty of far-away galaxies. Through this tiny window it imaged thousands of galaxies that suddenly revealed themselves in the darkness of time and space. This June, JWST observed one of the oldest galaxies ever seen as it is the most distant so far known. Galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0 is so far away that its light has just reached us from when the universe was only 290 million years old years after the Big Bang, which is about 2% of its current age of 13.8 billion years. This galaxy is also notable for its size and brightness and measures a huge 1,600 light-years plus in diameter. Galaxies seem to exist in what was believed to be the universe’s early dark ages, raising doubts over the science of our current cosmic model. And it wasn’t just a couple of galaxies; the Webb telescope has found hundreds of them! The shocking part is that this earliest and most distant galaxy already contains billions of bright young stars and is far more massive and mature than it should be according to our current model of the Universe. A huge conundrum and an unexpected trip back to the drawing board for cosmologists. Like “HRH Widdecombe”, who knows what other startling discoveries await in our distant cosmic roots?
Glynn Bennallick