Space.com
James Webb Space Telescope pierces through dust to find an ancient ghostly galaxy
"It's potentially telling us there's a whole population of galaxies that have been hiding from us."
Galaxy AzTECC71 as imaged by the James Webb Space
Telescope. (Image credit: J.
McKinney/M. Franco/C. Casey/The University of Texas at Austin)
This image of a galaxy
from the early universe is hardly what you'd call dazzling.
You are looking at a very blurry, highly dust-obscured resident of the
cosmos whose name is only a string of numbers and letters. It even sits
at a distance so far from Earth that it slips in and
out of the watchful eyes of various telescopes. The image, captured by the
powerful James Webb Space Telescope, spotlights galaxy AzTECC71 — but what's
striking here is that we're seeing AzTECC71the way it was just 900 million
years after the Big Bang. That's when the universe was turning on its
very first stars, absolute eons before our solar system was born.
The James Webb Space
Telescope's view of this galaxy as a hazy speck of light is a far cry from many
other glorious images of
galaxies and galaxy clusters in its repertoire. However, even this smudge
holds important lessons for our understanding of the early universe.
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