A series of new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations show a population of candidate massive galaxies that formed up 500 million years after the Big Bang.
The images show off Webb's staggering capability for gazing into the ancient past of the universe with its state-of-the-art infrared instruments.
They also add to the growing number of galaxies observed by the $10 billion space observatory that are much larger than expected for such an early time in the universe.
The new images, which are published today in a new paper in the journal Nature, shed new light on the formation of the very earliest galaxies.
"These galaxies are more massive than has been expected for this early point in time," a press statement reads. "Massive galaxies with stellar masses as high as 100 billion times that of the Sun have been identified at redshifts z ~ 6, approximately one billion years after the Big Bang, but it has been difficult to find massive galaxies at even earlier times," the statement continues.
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