James Webb Space Telescope’s view of Pandora’s Cluster. NASA, ESA, CSA, Ivo Labbe (Swinburne), Rachel Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh)

The James Webb Telescope continues to shake the foundations of modern cosmology. Separate observations have discovered a new pair of galaxies that were the most distant from us in the early universe. The discovered galaxy formed just 300 to 400 million years after the Big Bang and was discovered by the JWST Space Telescope’s near-infrared camera (NIRCam) and near-infrared spectrometer (NIRSpec).

This discovery occurred due to the effect of gravitational lensing. Despite its perfection, the James Webb telescope has limitations. Scientists selected the region around the giant galaxy cluster Abel 2744, about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth, for detailed study. Dense galaxy clusters strongly distort the space-time around them, acting like lenses that amplify light from objects far behind them. In February of this year, Webb conducted 30 hours of observations near the star cluster. Tens of thousands of light sources have been discovered, and astronomers have selected the 700 most distant candidates. Subsequent spectral analysis made it possible to identify truly distant objects and confirm their respective redshift values. This observation made it possible for scientists to identify his two new galaxies, the most distant ever observed. These are objects UNCOVER z-13 and UNCOVER z-12. The most distant of these galaxies existed about 330 million years after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.9 billion years ago. It wasn’t the farthest, but it was second in terms of distance. The UNCOVER z-12 galaxy was discovered shortly thereafter and was her fourth most distant galaxy discovered in the early Universe. I would like to emphasize that these are no longer candidates. These are confirmed to be distant galaxies.