CEERS-93316, The Record for the Farthest Galaxy just got Broken Again, now just 250 million years after the Big Bang
“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.”
“It’s amazing to have found such a distant galaxy candidate already with Webb given that this is just the first set of data,” says Mr. Callum Donnan, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, and lead author of the study. “It is important to note that to be certain of the redshift, the galaxy will need follow up observations using spectroscopy. This is why we refer to it as a galaxy candidate.” Given this incredible finding in just the first set of data from JWST, it’s intriguing to think how much father back in the universe this record-shattering space telescope can see, and whether it can see the Big Bang itself. “In principle JWST can detect galaxies at redshifts greater than 20, less than 200 million years after the Big Bang,” explains Bowler. “These galaxies will likely be extremely hard to find, but the detection of CERRS 93316 gives us hope that they may exist. Watch this space!” “The most distant phenomenon observed is the cosmic microwave background (CMB) which is the ‘afterglow’ of the Big Bang,” explains Donnan. “The light from the CMB comes from approximately 400,000 years after the Big Bang and has been observed by various instruments over the years – most notably the Planck satellite which launched in 2009. Webb won’t be able to see as far back as that, but it is able to probe the earliest stages of galaxy formation.” https://davesnews.co.uk/media/the-record-for-the-farthest-galaxy-just-got-broken-again-now-just-250-million-years-after-the-big-bang/
