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Did JWST find the most distant galaxy ever seen? Maaaaaybe.
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Did JWST find the most distant galaxy ever seen? Maaaaaybe.

SYFY·Phil Plait·about 1 month ago
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[ UPDATE : Welp. I wrote this article over the weekend and couldn't post it until Tuesday morning, and then on Monday night, literally 12 hours before this article went up, a whole bunch of different teams of astronomers posted four papers — and possibly a dozen more; I've lost track — where they've found galaxies in the JWST data that have redshifts of 14, 16, and one claim of a galaxy with a redshift of higher than 20 [ paper 1 , paper 2 , paper 3 , paper 4 ]. I've looked them over and while the claims look anywhere from tentative to actually quite good, what I wrote in the main article below still applies: These are candidate objects , because we can't confirm their redshifts without spectra. If, and that's a big if, but if they are confirmed this will throw early Universe cosmology into a tizzy; that z=20 galaxy would have existed some 150 million years after the Big Bang , long before we thought galaxies could gather themselves together.…

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