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As everyone has already pointed out, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is as close as you can get to the Big Bang. But to the larger point, these galax
by mandevil 4y ago
As everyone has already pointed out, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is as close as you can get to the Big Bang.
But to the larger point, these galaxies were suspected before, based on Hubble work. You see, the COBE satellite from 1989 to 1993 mapped the microwave background radiation very precisely (two of the Principal Investigators on COBE won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work). And they found that while there are minute fluctuations in the radiation, those fluctuations are measured at the parts-per-million level of difference. But the Hubble has found that the farthest back galaxies it could see were some of the largest and most massive things ever witnessed. So we had this gap between 'everything everywhere is the same to parts per million' and 'there are some supermassive galaxies' and so the Webb telescope was specifically designed to find the things that were redshifted so far they were out of the visible spectrum (so Hubble couldn't see them) but not so far that COBE could see them in microwave: in the infrared spectrum that lies between those two, that's where Webb is supposed to focus and help us understand how these galaxies form.
Because this question of what happened between the CMBR and the visible light range is the biggest question left over from Hubble, so it is what drove the design of the Webb. This is how astronomy has worked for centuries: you build a new telescope to answer some questions, but that leaves you with more questions, so you need to build new telescopes to answer those questions, GOTO 1. That's what's been happening ever since Galileo looked through that telescope at Jupiter all the way back in 1610.