The observation of thirteen distant galaxies located between 500 and 700 million years after the birth of the universe upsets theories on the formation of these particularly massive stars sets.
by David Larousserie
The James-Web-Web space telescope of the American, Canadian and European agencies, which opened his eyes to the sky since July 2022, confirms the hopes placed in him. Especially in its ability to go back in time and the film in the history of our universe. One of his latest harvests, published by nature February 22, thus plunges us between 500 and 700 million years after the Big Bang with images of thirteen galaxies, six of which are particularly massive. They are not among the most distant identified by the instrument, but their very existence challenges, because the cosmic recipe for the development of stars’ assemblies would not work for them. So early in the history of the universe, there would not be enough material to light so many stars.
“Two of these galaxies had been seen, barely, by the Hubble telescope in 2012, but the others are new. Their large mass was unexpected and justifies that they are exposed,” said Ivo Labbé, of the University From Technology Swinburne to Melbourne (Australia), the spokesperson for an international team made up of eleven people, mainly from the United States. Six of these newcomers exceed the mass of 10 billion suns, and one of them even exceeds 100 billion, which brings it closer to our Milky Way, but in thirty times more compact and in just a few tens of millions of ‘years of existence. Until now, such monsters had not been seen until the first billion years having followed the big bang.