JWST's Newfound Galaxies Are the Oldest Ever Seen

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April 13, 2023

Our top story this week reports the latest developments in the epic quest to glimpse the universe’s very first galaxies using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Almost as soon as JWST opened its infrared eye to the sky after launching in December 2021, the observatory began spying small, faint blobs of light in its “deep field” images that were thought to be some of the earliest galaxies ever seen. But confirming most of these objects were in fact far-distant emissaries from the ancient universe required time-consuming follow-up observations that are only now being reported. Read our coverage to find out more. Elsewhere this week, we have stories on sharper images and nomadic tendencies for giant black holes, new pictures of Uranus, the need for fresh ideas in the search for dark matter, and more. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics

Astronomy JWST's Newfound Galaxies Are the Oldest Ever Seen We now know that the first galaxies in our universe formed shockingly fast, thanks to the latest results from the James Webb Space Telescope By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Astronomy New Planet-Hunting Technique Finds Worlds We Can See Directly A promising combination of exoplanet-finding methods pinpoints details about its first world By Nola Taylor Tillman

Astronomy Most Planets in the Galaxy Orbit Stars You Can't Even See Red dwarfs are dim bulbs but host more Earth-like planets than any other kind of star By Phil Plait

Astrophysics Astronomers Spy a Giant Runaway Black Hole's Starry Wake A candidate “rogue” supermassive black hole may weigh as much as 20 million suns and has sparked a trail of star formation that is 200,000 light-years long By Kenna Hughes-Castleberry

Planetary Science JWST Captures Stunning Image of Rings around Uranus The imagery offers a rare view of the ice giant’s ring system, bright moons and dynamic atmosphere By Robert Lea,SPACE.com

Black Holes See the Sharp New Image of an Iconic Black Hole Using machine learning, researchers have now created a much sharper portrait of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87 By Meghan Bartels

Dark Matter Dark Matter Hunters Need Fresh Answers The hunt for dark matter is in crisis, and it’s time for radical new ideas to explain our universe By Joseph Howlett

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Volume 328, Issue 4

QUOTE OF THE DAY "It's astonishing. You go from nothing to these fully formed galaxies in the blink of an eye." Pieter van Dokkum, an astronomer at Yale University, on the rapid assembly of early galaxies as seen by JWST.

FROM THE ARCHIVE The James Webb Space Telescope Has Launched: Now Comes the Hard Part After years of delay, the most ambitious observatory ever built has at last left Earth. It now faces a high-stakes series of deployments in deep space By Richard Panek | December 2021

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