American and European space service (NASA as well as ESA) announced that the space telescope James Webb discovered two unexpectedly bright galaxies that are among the earliest and most distant ever observed.

The two galaxies are estimated to be only 350 and 450 million years old, respectively, after the “Big Bang” that created the universe. The current record holder for distance in space and time is a galaxy that existed 400 million years ago after the Big Bang and was discovered in 2016 by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The high brightness of two such young but relatively small galaxies is a mystery to scientists. The two galaxies have so far been “invisible” to other less powerful telescopes. Watching the light of very distant celestial objects that have made a long journey to Earth means that astronomers are simultaneously seeing something that existed in the distant past.

The researchers, led by Marco Castellano from the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy and Rohan Naidu from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States, made the relevant publications in the astrophysical journal The Astrophysical Research Letters. press conference dedicated to the opening. New observations by James Webb have led astronomers to conclude that there were an unexpectedly large number of galaxies in the early days, much brighter than expected.

“Everything we see is new. Webb shows us that there is a much richer universe than we imagined. Once again, the Universe has surprised us. These early galaxies are very unusual in many ways. They are very different from our own galaxy or from other large galaxies that we see around us today,” said Tommaso Treu of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

“These remarks will make your head explode. This is a brand new chapter in astronomy. It’s like an archaeological dig where you suddenly find a lost city or something you didn’t know anything about,” said Paola Santini of the Roman Observatory.

“While the distances to these early galaxies need to be confirmed by spectroscopy, their extreme luminosity is a real mystery, a challenge to our understanding of galaxy formation,” said Pascal Hoes of the University of Geneva.

“We found something incredibly charming. These galaxies should have started forming just 100 million years after the Big Bang. No one expected the “dark ages” to end so quickly. It’s impressive that we see such bright galaxies at such an early age,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The $10 billion James Webb Telescope, launched last December, is the largest and most powerful telescope ever sent into space. It revolves around the Sun at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers from Earth.

^{Source: RES-IPE}