Previously Unseen Galaxies Discovered

There could be 10 to 20 percent more galaxies in the universe than astronomy has discovered so far. The James Webb Space Telescope will soon be searching for it systematically.

Copenhagen, Denmark). World University of Copenhagen You have two with ALMA radio telescope galaxies They discovered 29 billion light-years from Earth, which was invisible to the Hubble Space Telescope. According to what was published in the specialized magazine temper nature Is this an indication that it’s early Universe Galaxies could be much, much more than that astronomy accepted yet.

According to the authors, the fact that the Hubble Space Telescope was unable to detect the two galaxies is due to the fact that their visible light was swallowed up by cosmic dust on its long journey. Therefore, only radio spectrum signals reach the Earth.

10 to 20 percent of unseen galaxies

A comparison with previously available data about the universe a few hundred million years after the Big Bang shows that, according to the authors, astronomy has not yet been able to see 10-20 percent of galaxies. According to the researchers, the new findings could, among other things, have an impact on theories of the formation of galaxies.

REBELS-12-2 and REBELS-29-2

the one with Alma (The newly discovered Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) are called REBELS-12-2 and REBELS-29-2. Scientists discovered them after carefully analyzing the galaxies discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope. In doing so, they discovered that two of these known galaxies have neighbors that cannot be seen in the Hubble images. Using data from the ALMA telescope, the presence of REBELS-12-2 and REBELS-29-2 can then be confirmed.

13 billion years

According to the analysis, light from galaxies has traveled to Earth for about 13 billion years. Due to the further expansion of the universe, galaxies are now 29 billion light-years away from us. Scientists now want to investigate how to find previously overlooked galaxies in the early universe. According to astronomer Pascal Ochs of the Niels Bohr Institute, the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be launched in a few weeks, will be used for this.

Nature, doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-03846-z