The possible galaxy identified by JWST could be the first we have ever seen

Astronomers may have discovered a galaxy which formed very early in the universe, almost 200 million years before its nearest competitor, but they claim that there could also be other explanations.

Giovanni Gandolfi at the University of Padua in Italy and his colleagues surveyed data from the James Webb space telescope (JWST) to search for distant objects that were formed at the start of the history of 13.8 billion years of our universe.

The more a galaxy is more distant from the earth, the longer its light to reach us and the more it will be moved to the red end of the spectrum by expansion of space, a property known as Redshift.

To date, the first confirmed galaxy – which has been spotted by JWST and is called Mom -Z14 – has a red time of 14.4, which means that the light that reaches us now began to move to us when the universe was 280 million years old. Gandolfi and his team, however, reported an amazing object with a red time of 32, which implies that we look at him as was the case where the universe was only 90 million years old. They named him Capotauro, after a mountain in Italy.

“Capotauro could be the most distant galaxy ever seen,” explains Gandolfi, during a “time scale compatible with the first stars and the black holes to form in the universe”.

The team came to this conclusion by noting a small blip in a deep JWST study in the sky which seemed to be a distant galaxy. Using different filters on the telescope, the team could then calculate the amount of light from the galaxy would have been shifted in red, arriving at a figure of 32.

If it is correct, the object could be an extremely young galaxy in the formation process, or something more unusual as a primordial black hole surrounded by a dense atmosphere – a hypothetical object known as the black hole star.

However, the supposed galaxy seems unusually shiny, similar to galaxies seen in subsequent red shifts like Mom-Z14, which gives it a suspected mass of about a billion times that of the sun-beyond what our models suggest that we should be possible at this age of the universe.

To reach such a mass, the efficiency to which the galaxy has transformed gas into stars should be close to 100%, explains Nicha Leethochawalit to the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand: “This means that no star can explode.” But modeling suggests that 10 to 20% are possible. “I think there is something that is wrong,” she says.

If it is not a galaxy, Gandolfi and his team say that the object could rather be explained by a brown dwarf – a failed star – or a clay planet in our galaxy deriving in the field of vision of JWST, seeming similar to the drop distant from a galaxy. These two explanations are also interesting, explains Gandolfi, because it would be a dwarf or a particularly distant brown and cold planet, up to 6000 light years and at room temperature.

“It could be one of the first sub-even objects ever trained in our galaxy,” explains Gandolfi.

To discover with certainty, the team would need follow -up time on JWST to separate the light from the object in the smallest detail. Leethochawalit says that even if it promotes the explanation that it is not a galaxy, such a follow -up could still be worth it.

“If it is a galaxy with a gap towards red 32, many things that we have thought so far would be false,” she said.

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