NASA JWST may have found the first galaxies of the universe! Shocking!

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The JWST, or James Webb Space Telescope, has been giving us a great look into the cosmos ever since it went up last year. After a stunning bunch of pictures last year that stunned the internet, JWST has now given a team of scientists the first glimpse into what could be a bunch of the first galaxies that were created after the Big Bang. Astronomer Haojing Yan from the University of Missouri published a new study that catalogues 87 galaxies in the universe that could date back to almost 13.6 billion years ago. That would be just 200 million years after the Big Bang.

“This is the first large sample of candidate galaxies beyond the reach of the Hubble Space Telescope,” said Haojing Yan at a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. The birthdates of these galaxies are yet to be confirmed, which is why they are termed as candidate galaxies. If confirmed, we could be looking at the earliest galaxies that the universe created, although we won't know if those galaxies are still alive and in what form.

Although scientists have been studying several older galaxies that were discovered previously, Yan's report could give his team the chance to break a record since these galaxies could be closer to the Big Bang's date.

Finding the birthdate of these galaxies could be a big challenge. Scientists will need to measure its redshift, a technique that calculates how much light it emits is stretched towards the longer red wavelengths. This tells astronomers how fast the galaxy is moving away from us, thereby telling us the distance in the process. This could help scientists determine the time for the light to reach us, which is currently expected to be 13.6 billion years ago.

Yan's team used the JWST's NIRCam