James Webb: The oldest galaxy ever seen in the Universe has been discovered

The new facts and revelations that come to light about the Universe thanks to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope follow one another.

As it became known today, the James Webb discovered the oldest known galaxy in the universe.

It is a collection of stars called GLASS-z13 and dates back just 300 million years after the Big Bang.

The previous galaxy previously thought to be the oldest was 100 million years older and was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope.

While exploring the area near the GN-z13James Webb also spotted the galaxy GN-z11, and scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts note that both galaxies are very small, New Scientist reports.

GN-z13 is about 1,600 light-years across and GLASS z-11 is 2,300 light-years across.

Both galaxies have a mass equivalent to 1 billion suns, which the team of scientists suggests is what they would expect from galaxies that are 500 million years old, and which could indicate that stars formed even earlier than scientists thought .

“We found two very exciting candidates for extremely distant galaxies,” Rohan Naidu, a graduate student in the university’s astronomy department, told New Scientist.

It is possible that the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to “see” further back and discover galaxies as young as 200 million years old, and could – as the researchers say in their findings – be a “critical step in fulfilling JWST’s mission of mapping cosmic dawn.”

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