Mysterious Ghost Captured by James Webb Telescope in Space [Photo]

According to Saed News’ Society Service, citing Khabar Online, Tina Mazdaki reports: this dusty, faint galaxy was previously completely undetectable by the Hubble Space Telescope. AzTECC71 is a distant, star-forming galaxy that dates back to nearly 1 billion years after the Big Bang. It has recently thrilled astronomers, offering a tantalizing glimpse of some of the universe’s earliest structures.

Jad McKinney, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas and one of the authors of a paper recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, said in a new press release, “Although it appears as a tiny smudge, it is actually forming hundreds of new stars every year.”

He added, “What is barely visible even in the most sensitive imaging from our latest telescope is incredibly exciting to me. This image potentially tells us that there is an entire population of galaxies hidden from view.”

The research is part of the COSMOS-Web JWST project, which aims to map 1 million galaxies to gain a better understanding of the universe’s earliest epochs.

While analyzing the data, astronomers sought to track down AzTECC71. Hubble was too faint to detect it, though the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii identified it as a dusty smudge.

Thanks to JWST’s far more sensitive infrared instruments, however, they discovered a familiar yet still dim galaxy in its rightful place.

McKinney explained, “Until now, the only way we could see galaxies in the early universe was through Hubble’s optical perspective. This means our understanding of galaxy evolution has been biased, because we were only seeing less obscured, less dusty galaxies.”