James Webb helps discover small galaxy that produces new stars at high power: Why is this discovery important?

Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of scientists from the University of Minnesota has discovered a unique small galaxy that is "producing" new stars at an extremely high rate for its size.

Just 500 million years after the Big Bang, this galaxy is one of the smallest ever discovered at such a distance, and studying it could help astronomers learn more about galaxies that existed shortly after the universe formed.

The study was published in the journal Science, which is considered one of the world's leading scientific journals.

"This galaxy is far from the reach of all telescopes except James Webb, and the first-of-its-kind observations of this distant galaxy are impressive," said senior study author Patrick Kelly, associate professor at the University of Minnesota's School of Physics and Astronomy.

"We can study the past almost to the time of the Big Bang, and we have never studied in such detail the galaxies that existed at the beginning of the dawn of the universe. This galaxy occupies almost a million times less volume than the Milky Way, but we see that it still forms the same number of stars every year,” he added.

Scientists were able to find and study this small and new galaxy thanks to an interesting cosmic phenomenon called gravitational lensing. It occurs when an object with significant mass bends the light passing by it, as a result of which the image of the background object can be magnified. Due to gravitational lensing, the small background galaxy appeared 20 times brighter than its true luminosity.

"Galaxies that existed during the formation of the universe were very different from the galaxies we see now in the nearby universe," explained Haley Williams, the first author of the paper and a PHD student at the Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics. "This discovery will help us learn more about the characteristics of the first galaxies, how they differ from nearby galaxies and how early galaxies formed."