The SciTechDaily website runs an article by the European Space Agency reporting on a major milestone achieved by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). An international team of astronomers, led by those who shepherded the development of two of the instruments onboard Webb—the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec)—used data from the telescope to report the earliest galaxies confirmed to date. The light from these galaxies took more than 13.4 billion years to reach Earth, and these galaxies are estimated to date back to less than 400 million years after the so-called “Big Bang” (which is still just a scientific theory, not a fact).
The ESA article, “Major Milestone: NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Discovers Earliest Galaxies in the Universe,” reported: “The investigation of the faintest and earliest galaxies was the leading motivation behind the concepts for these instruments [NIRCam and NIRSpec]. In 2015 the instrument teams joined together to propose the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), an ambitious program that has been allocated just over one month of the telescope’s time spread over two years, and is designed to provide a view of the early universe unprecedented in both depth and detail. JADES is an international collaboration of more than eighty astronomers from ten countries.
“The first round of JADES observations focused on the area in and around the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field. (see image below). For over 20 years, this small patch of sky has been the target of nearly all large telescopes, building an exceptionally sensitive data set spanning the full electromagnetic spectrum. Now Webb is adding its unique view, providing the faintest and sharpest images yet obtained.
