James Webb Space Telescope discovers three new very old and mysterious galaxies

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected three new galaxies that have never been observed before and that have a strange shapea discovery that shows that the early Universe was more active than previously believed.

According to a report published on the website of the Chain Beingthese mysterious new galaxies went unnoticed not only by the old Hubble telescope, but even by more powerful ground-based telescopes, such as the Gran Telescopio de Canarias.

These galaxies are heterogeneous in nature, that is, they some of them formed most of their stars in the very young Universe and assembled very quickly and therefore astronomers say they are already dead, because they do not form new stars in significant numbers.

Instead, another of these galaxies reflects the opposite: it is forming stars very actively and in regions with a lot of interstellar dust. While the third cluster lived when the Universe was barely a billion years oldbut it seems that they already had many oxygen atoms at high temperatures and glowed very brightly.

What do the experts think?

The authors of this study interpret this emission as the presence of very hot stars with very young ages, because they should be one or two million years old at most. But the presence of oxygen means that there must be other stars that formed before that we can’t see because they are so much fainter than the young ones.

Pablo Pérez-González, a Spanish researcher who works at the Center for Astrobiology of Spain and lead author of the work, explained: “Imagine that you are in a football game for only 5 minutes, what are the chances that you will see a player score a goal? So it’s really strange, it’s very hard to match that so many galaxies have stars that are only 2 million years old when the Universe was a billion years old.”.

“Something must be happening in these galaxies that we still do not understand, perhaps we are seeing the formation of the first supermassive black holeswhich we believe exist today in all nearby galaxies and may be crucial in the evolution of our universeor”, highlights the scientist.

With a larger mirror size and a greater coverage of wavelengths, James Webb is able not only to study these elusive galaxies as a whole, “but also to analyze their internal structure, being able, for example, to determine if some parts of the galaxy formed before others”, they add.