Thread by @chrislintott

A couple of further comments on the paper out earlier with the tentative identification of very distant galaxies in early #JWST data (1/n)

https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1549780839772217345

Firstly, the paper's not reviewed yet, so take appropriate pinches of salt, though what's done looks sensible to me. (The team themselves note the dangers of working with a new instrument they may not fully understand yet). (2/n)

The gold standard would be to look at features in the spectra of these systems that confirm their distance - that hasn't been done yet. Instead, the pattern of how bright the system appears in different colours matches what we'd expect for very distant systems (3/n)

This is a normal way of finding distant galaxies - we just haven't been able to apply it at this distances, as we need #JWST's coverage of wavelengths enabled by it being in space, plus its giant mirror for that (4/n)

What's most exciting is that it's perhaps surprising to have two candidate sources in a relatively small field of view. This suggests that #JWST will find lots more of things like this as it images more of the sky (5/n)

Even more interestingly, this finding indicates that (possibly) there are more bright galaxies forming stars like gangbusters early on in the Universe than we might have predicted. (6/6)

Ps I'm not sure how many of us are going to get much work done if there are going to be new #JWST papers every day. It's truly very exciting.