Thunderbolts Forum v3.0

New study reveals wide diversity of galaxies in the early universe

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"There have been previous studies emphasizing that we see a lot of galaxies with disks at high redshift, which is true, but in this study we also see a lot of galaxies with other structures, such as spheroids and irregular shapes, as we do at lower redshifts," said Kartaltepe, lead author on the paper and CEERS co-investigator. "This means that even at these high redshifts, galaxies were already fairly evolved and had a wide range of structures."

"This tells us that we don't yet know when the earliest galaxy structures formed," said Kartaltepe. "We're not yet seeing the very first galaxies with disks. We'll have to examine a lot more galaxies at even higher redshifts to really quantify at what point in time features like disks were able to form."

The 1st galaxies may have formed much earlier than we thought, James Webb Space Telescope reveal

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Using early observations from the telescope, astronomers looked for galaxies at "very high redshifts," which would indicate that these galaxies formed earlier in the universe. The team detected 87 galaxies that may have been the first to appear in the universe, about 200 million to 400 million years after the Big Bang, according to a statement from the University of Missouri. 

"Finding such a large number of galaxies in the early parts of the universe suggests that we might need to revise our previous understanding of galaxy formation," Haojing Yan, an astronomer at the University of Missouri and lead author of the study, said in the statement. "Our finding gives us the first indication that a lot of galaxies could have been formed in the universe much earlier than previously thought."

"I believe this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg because the data we used only focused on a very small area of the universe," Yan said in the statement. "After this, I anticipate that other teams of astronomers will find similar results elsewhere in the vast reaches of space as [Webb] continues to provide us with a new view of the deepest parts of our universe."