In its first year, the James Webb Space Telescope has found many galaxies from the early universe that are bigger, brighter and more mature than expected.
The amount of stretching of that light, known as the redshift, is astronomers’ proxy for cosmic distance and age. The present-day universe is at redshift zero. A redshift of 1 corresponds to about 6 billion years after the Big Bang. A redshift of 4 is about 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, and so on.
“It really requires JWST to push to even earlier times,” Kartaltepe said, “which we need to understand the very beginnings of galaxy formation.” JWST can help fill in those details. Taking a census of the galaxies that were around during the era of reionization could help illuminate how it got started.
Astronomers sifted through the images like a cosmic Where’s Waldo, picking the reddest-looking candidate galaxies out of the pack.
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