How the Webb telescope is rewriting the story of the universe

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How the Webb telescope is rewriting the story of the universe
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NASA’s Webb telescope is pulling back the shroud on the earliest galaxies, which are more numerous and brighter than expected. “It’s not quite like how we might have predicted.”

, or the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, began using Webb to observe patches of sky for dozens of hours at a time. Two weeks after observations began, the collaboration gathered in Tucson at the University of Arizona to discuss the first results.

The scientists, from tenured professors to twentysomething graduate students, were preoccupied with the mosaic on their laptops: hundreds of images freshly captured by Webb and stitched together. The picture, shared with the team only days before, contained tens of thousands of galaxies and other celestial objects.

—the source of the mosaic of galaxies on everyone’s laptop. She oversaw its design, a 330-pound assemblage of mirrors, lenses, and detectors to drink in the light of the universe and study it through different filters. But not everything on the telescope was functioning perfectly. JADES’s, had been experiencing electrical shorts that created spots of light and drowned out astronomical targets in some of the observations.

“We just went crazy looking through this data that no one had ever seen, looking for these candidates,” Kevin Hainline, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona, told me later in his office. Distant galaxies are not the only way to learn about the primordial cosmos. Nearby dwarf galaxies, such as Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte , contain small stars that formed early in the universe and are still around today.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Webb has now peered into the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte galaxy to study some of these ancient, slow-burning stars—fossils from earlier eras.

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