The James Webb Space Telescope was supposed to revolutionize the search dedicated, among other things, to distant galaxies, and it must be admitted that it was very perplexing on the subject.
The new NASA telescope, despite less than a month of its scientific mission, has already managed to break the record twice in the category of the oldest and most distant galaxy. It is also possible that there is a third in stock, although in this case it is a real Schrödinger galaxy.
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All the confusion is with CEERS-1749, the image of which most likely appears in the state only 220 million years after the Big Bang. If these reports are confirmed, it will not only be a record, but will also disprove most models of the early evolution of galaxies.
Where did the doubts come from? It concerns the surprisingly high degree of sophistication of the observed structures. The scenario that CEERS-1749 is not as old and distant as it seems at first glance cannot be ruled out either. The so-called redshift, which measures how fast an object is moving away from us, causing spectral lines to shift toward the lower end of the spectrum.
CEERS-1749 seems to have broken records and is much closer
The expansion of the universe means that the longer a galaxy or star has existed, the further away it is from us. Last year, the record for the observed galaxy with the highest shift was z = 11. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, it was very quickly possible to increase this result to z = 13, and then to z = 14.
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If the measurements made for CERES-1749 are correct, its redshift will be z = 17. It is noteworthy, however, that this galaxy has three other galaxies with z = 5 displacement, and may in fact be part of a group formed with this group . In other words, everything can turn into an illusion. At the moment, CERES-1749 can be considered the Schrödinger Galaxy, as it is still the oldest known galaxy and is billions of years younger.
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