Artist’s illustration of a protogalaxy. This is not real, it’s just a colorful image generated by Midjourney AI.
In a recent study submitted to MNRAS, a collaborative research team has utilized the first set of data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovering a galaxy candidate, CEERS-93316, that formed approximately 250 million years after the Bing Bang, which also set a new redshift record of z = 16.7. This finding is extremely intriguing as it demonstrates the power of JWST, which only started sending back its first set of data a few weeks ago. CEERS stands for Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey, and was specifically created for imaging with JWST.
Postage stamp images of CEERS-93316 from their respective JWST NIRCam (Near Infrared Camera) filters (F115W, F150W, F200W, F277W, F356W, and F444W). (Credit: Donnan et al. (2022))
“The past few weeks have been surreal, watching all the records that stood for a long time with Hubble be broken by JWST,” says Dr. Rebecca Bowler, who is an Ernest Rutherford Fellow at the University of Manchester, and a co-author on the study. “Finding a z = 16.7 galaxy candidate is an amazing feeling – it wasn’t something we were expecting from the early data.”
This new study references a dozen previous studies that have measured objects up to redshifts z ? 10 using a mixture of ground-based observations and with the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope.
