James Webb Telescope uncovers secrets of ancient galaxies and celestial monsters.
The James Webb Space Telescope has identified a massive, densely packed galaxy known as GS-9209, which formed just 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang and is the earliest of its kind found to date. Despite being around 10 times smaller than the Milky Way, GS-9209 has a similar number of stars to our own galaxy. GS-9209 is the earliest known example of a galaxy no longer forming stars, known as a quiescent galaxy, and contains a supermassive black hole at its center that is five times larger than astronomers might anticipate in a galaxy with this number of stars.