A James Webb Space Telescope study is setting the record straight on the ages of some known ancient galaxies, which have turned out to be much older and farther away in space than previously thought.
Webb, a joint observatory of NASA and its European and Canadian counterparts, took a fresh look at a piece of the sky made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope’s ultra-deep field view more than 20 years ago. At that time, Hubble’s long-exposure image was extremely ambitious: Scientists pointed the telescope at a seemingly starless area, unsure what photons they’d collect.
In the end, that ultra-deep field image was “found to be anything but blank,” Webb researchers said, “containing thousands of distant galaxies.”
Now with Webb, this patch of sky is revealing more about the universe — even shuffling the cosmic timeline. Known as the MIRI Deep Imaging Survey, the project involved the Webb telescope’s mid-infrared instrument, which detects light wavelengths invisible to the naked eye. The new findings from the survey are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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