Imagine looking at a vast city on Earth from a great distance, knowing nothing about that city; you may assume that its only buildings are the largest, most visible skyscrapers. But, get closer or look with a far more powerful tool, and you would begin to discover smaller buildings between mountainous skyscrapers.
Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered that this looks like that is a fitting analogy for early galaxies.
Astronomers are finding that in between the brightest stars, the 'tallest skyscrapers' in the above analogy, there are much fainter stars analogous to smaller buildings. That means early galaxies may actually have a lot more mass packed into them than we believed.
The team behind this research reached this conclusion by using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study nine early galaxies that have passed ...


English (US)