'Schrodinger's Galaxy Candidate' is JWST's Latest Deep Space Puzzle to Solve

upstart writes:

The candidate is so far away that it might even break our models of the early universe, but there's a catch:

Astronomers armed with early data obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are hunting galaxies that existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Rohan Naidu, an astrophysicist based at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), and his colleagues have been particularly good at uncovering these cosmic relics.

[...] In a pre-print paper, released on Aug. 5 and yet to undergo peer review, Naidu and colleagues have detailed another distant galaxy candidate, from one of JWST's early release science programs, known as CEERS-1749. It's an extremely bright galaxy that, if confirmed, would have existed just 220 million years after the Big Bang -- and it could also rewrite our understanding of the cosmos.

But there's a huge catch.

CEERS-1749 could be one of the most distant galaxies we've ever seen or it could be lurking much closer to home. Essentially, the data seems to indicate two possible places for the galaxy to be -- and we won't know which one is correct without observing it a lot more. That's earned it the title of "Schrodinger's galaxy candidate" in the paper submitted to pre-print repository, arXiv, on Aug. 4.

So, how can a galaxy like Schrodinger (the name we're running with because it's way more fun than CEERS-1749) seem to be in two different places? It's all about redshift.

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