Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2023

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023 les, principal investigator on one of the Webb programs. “Once again the universe has surprised us. These early galaxies are very unusual in many ways.” Two research papers, led by Marco Castellano of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, Italy, and Rohan Naidu of the Harvard-Smith- sonian Center for Astrophysics and the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology in Cambridge, Massachu- setts, have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters . These initial findings are from a broader Webb research initiative in- volving two Early Release Science (ERS) programs: the Grism Lens-Am- plified Survey from Space (GLASS), and the Cosmic Evolution Early Re- lease Science survey (CEERS). With just four days of analysis, re- searchers found two exceptionally bright galaxies in the GLASS-JWST images. These galaxies existed ap- proximately 450 and 350 million years after the big bang (with a red- shift of approximately 10.5 and 12.5, respectively), though future spectro- scopic measurements with Webb will help confirm. “With Webb, we were amazed to find the most distant starlight that anyone had ever seen, just days after Webb released its first data,” said Naidu of the more distant by NASA/ESA/CSA Ray Villard Christine Pulliam A few days after officially starting science operations, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope propelled astronomers into a realm of early galaxies, previ- ously hidden beyond the grasp of all other telescopes until now. “Everything we see is new. Webb is showing us that there’s a very rich universe beyond what we imag- ined,” said Tommaso Treu of the University of California at Los Ange- Record-breaking galaxies in Abell 2744