It might have been in space for over four years now, but the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – which has been instrumental to plenty of new discoveries – is just getting started.

The telescope is expected to last for at least twenty years, meaning that currently it is only around a fifth of the way through it’s fully-functional lifespan: so it’s not slowing down any time soon.

Case in point: researchers at A&M University have recently made use of the telescope’s incredible observations to discover something extremely rare.

And their discovery tells us a lot about the processes that happened in the universe’s earliest days.

Images from the JWST made it possible for the researchers to notice that, around 800 million years after the big bang, multiple galaxies – at least five – seemed to be colliding.

In the findings, which were recently published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the team explain that the galactic collisions seemed to be reshaping the universe by redistributing heavy elements, at a time period much earlier than we’ve ever known.

As they collided, the galaxies seem to be surrounded by a halo of oxygen and hydrogen (initially produced inside stars) which actually glowed – suggesting that a combination of colliding gravity and galactic winds had forced it out.

It’s not just these interactions that make this discovery so important: it’s the fact that using JWST’s data, astronomers are literally rewriting everything we thought we knew about our universe.

Known as ‘JWST’s Quintet’, this evidence proves that, despite what researchers once thought, galaxies interacted and merged in the early universe with significant repercussions, as researcher Weida Hu explains in a statement:

“What makes this remarkable is that a merger involving such a large number of galaxies was not expected so early in the universe’s history, when galaxy mergers were thought to (be) simpler and usually involve only two to three galaxies.”

This rewriting is proving typical of the interpretation of the telescope’s observations, with scientists frequently able to update estimates with visual data – all markers of the JWST’s success.

Who knows what the telescope will discover next?

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