James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

Early Results from GLASS-JWST. XXI: Rapid assembly of a galaxy at z=6.23 revealed by its C/O abundance

The abundance of carbon relative to oxygen is a promising probe of star formation history in the early universe, and this is exactly what we see in a this galaxy. According to the results, the carbon abundance consistent with the expected yield from core-collapse supernovae, indicating that longer-lived intermediate mass stars have not fully contributed to carbon enrichment. This in turn implies rapid buildup of a young stellar population with age of 100 Myr in a galaxy seen ~900 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy's redshift is measured at z=6.23, meaning when the light we see form the galaxy traveled for ~12.7 billion years, and the galaxy's current distance from us is over 23.5 billion light years by now, due to the expansion of the universe. This image was taken using JWST's F115W/F200W/F444W(=blue/green/red) filters.