NASA Reveals Never-Before-Seen Images of 'Early Universe'

NASA revealed on Wednesday new images of an "early universe" as part of the findings by three scientists who were observing the distant galaxy MACS0647-JD by using the James Webb Space Telescope.

"The nature of galaxies during this early period of our universe is not well known nor understood. But with the help of gravitational lensing by a cluster of galaxies in the foreground, faint background galaxies can be magnified and also appear multiple times in different parts of the image," NASA said in a statement.

The scientists who worked on the findings include Dan Coe of AURA/Space Telescope Science Institute for the European Space Agency and Johns Hopkins University, Rebecca Larson of the University of Texas at Austin, and Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao of Johns Hopkins University.

The James Webb Space Telescope that was used by the team is the largest optical telescope in space with a high resolution and sensitivity that allows astronomers to view objects that are old, distant, or faint. It is designed to detect the faint infrared light from galaxies very far away.

The new Webb images reveal "little dots" in the background that are all galaxies, according to Larson, who added that "it's amazing the amount of information that we're getting that we just weren't able to see before. And this is not a deep field.

"This is not a long exposure. We haven't even really tried to use this telescope to look at one spot for a long time. This is just the beginning!" the scientist added.

Larson added that scientists hadn't been able to thoroughly study galaxies in the early universe before Webb.

"Studying them can help us understand how they evolved into the ones like the galaxy we live in today. And also, how the universe evolved throughout time," said Larson.

Meanwhile, Hsiao spoke about the "interesting" findings they discovered about the "early universe."

"It's really interesting that we see two structures in such a small system. We might be witnessing a galaxy merger in the very early universe. If this is the most distant merger, I will be really ecstatic!" Hsiao said.

Last week, a NASA probe captured footage of two comets falling into the surface of the sun. The footage was captured by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, which was launched by NASA and the European Space Agency in 1995.

Coronagraph footage showed the two "Kreutz sungrazer" comets heading straight toward the sun.

Kreutz sungrazers are a group of comets with a similar orbit, and most of them plunge into the sun. It is thought that they all come from a progenitor comet that dismantled, forming thousands of smaller fragment comets.

"What makes Kreutz comets unusual is that they all have the same (or very close) orbit, so we think they are fragments of a parent comet that previously disrupted," Tabaré Gallardo, an astronomer at the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, told Newsweek. "It is unclear when that disruption occurred."

Newsweek reached out to NASA's communications office for comment.