James Webb set to break record for farthest observation – 07/12/2023 – Science

The main objective of the James Webb Space Telescope has always been to expand the observational frontiers of the Universe, delving into the depths of the cosmos to see what it was like between 500 million and 200 million years after the Big Bang. The light that goes back to that remote past was so distorted on its way to Earth that it can only be seen in infrared, justifying the choice in the design of the new telescope.

Indeed, the revolution began almost instantly, with the release of the first scientific image a year ago. Webb quickly broke the record for observing the most distant galaxy more than once, and is expected to do so again in the future. The current one concerns the galaxy JADES-GS-z13-0, which we are seeing now as it was just 330 million years after the Big Bang.

In early July, astronomers announced the discovery, with Webb, of the most distant active supermassive black hole ever detected. Like its colleagues, it lives in the heart of a galaxy and is being seen now as it was when the Universe was only 570 million years old. And the interesting thing is that it is such a black hole that is relatively small, with 9 million times the mass of the Sun —comparable to the also tiny inhabitant at the center of the Milky Way, which is 4.6 million times the mass of the Sun. Sun.

The researchers’ hope is to continue finding examples like this one in the depths of space, in order to reconstruct the initial history of the formation of the first galaxies and their supermassive black holes, at a time when the Universe, just out of the Big Bang, was well different than it is today.

“We’ve already learned from Webb that there are more galaxies in the remote past than we expected, and they are brighter than we expected,” says Jane Rigby, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Center for Space Flight and a senior scientist at Webb. “What we’re finding is that galaxies formed earlier than we thought and formed more stars. We’re getting a beautiful view of how galaxies formed and organized — and that was the scientific quest that led to the telescope.”

While scientists are working on the data collected during the first year of observation, the calendar is already filled in for the second year. “We’ve selected an ambitious set of observations for year two that build on everything we’ve learned so far,” says Rigby. “The scientific mission is just beginning — there is much more to come.”