Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have seen “Green Pea” galaxies that are dated 13.1 billion years ago, and were spotted just 700 million years after the Big Bang, according to ScienceNews.
The findings were announced by astronomers at a January 9th news conference in Seattle at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting.
Green Peas first showed up in 2009 in images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which was a project to map much of the sky and citizen science volunteers gave the objects their name, due to their greenish hue.
Most of the “Green Peas” light from from glowing gas clouds, as opposed to getting light directly from stars.
“They’re a bit like living fossils,” said astrophysicist James Rhoads of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “This helps us explain how the universe reionized,” Rhoads said. “I think this is an important piece of the puzzle.”
