The galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope, existed 290 million years after the Big Bang.
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The galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope, existed 290 million years after the Big Bang.
The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered what appears to be a new record holder for the farthest known galaxy, a remarkably bright galaxy that existed just 290 million years after the Big Bang, NASA said Thursday.
Since coming online in 2022, the Webb Telescope has ushered in a new era of scientific breakthroughs, looking further than ever before into the far reaches of the universe – which also means looking back in time.
And the latest finding has “profound implications” for our understanding of the so-called Cosmic Dawn, researchers said.
An international team of astronomers first spotted the JADES-GS-z14-0 galaxy in early 2023, but they needed further observations to ensure it was truly a record-breaker and not a ‘confusing oddity’ , they said in a joint statement. .
“The source was surprisingly bright, which we wouldn’t expect for such a distant galaxy, and it was very close to another galaxy, so that the two appeared to be part of one larger object,” said Stefano Carniani of Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy. and Kevin Hainline of the University of Arizona.
By the time light from the most distant galaxies reaches Earth, it has been stretched by the expansion of the universe and shifted into the infrared region of the light spectrum, which Webb can detect with unprecedented clarity.
The team made confirmatory observations in October and then in January – first with Webb’s primary imaging sensor called NIRCam, and second with his NIRSpec which analyzes an object’s light spectrum to determine its physical properties – to be more certain of their hypothesis.
JADES-GS-z14-0 comfortably beats the previous record for the oldest known galaxy, held by JADES-GS-z13-0, which was present 320 million years after the Big Bang.
Image of the James Webb Space Telescope, successor to Hubble.
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Image of the James Webb Space Telescope, successor to Hubble.
When the age was confirmed in January, “I had to step away from my computer, it felt so ridiculous to see this,” Hainline said in a video on YouTube.
“If the universe were a two-hour movie, then this galaxy is the first two and a half minutes,” he added.
The predictions have been reversed
“The most important aspect of JADES-GS-z14-0 was that at this distance we know that this galaxy must be intrinsically very bright,” Carniani and Hainline said.
The images showed that the galaxy is 1,600 light-years across, indicating that the light comes mainly from young stars and not from emission near a growing supermassive black hole.
“This starlight implies that the galaxy has hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun!” the researchers said. “This begs the question: How can nature create such a bright, massive and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?”
Further analysis of the light emission points to the presence of oxygen, another surprising finding indicating that “several generations of very massive stars had already lived their lives before we observed the galaxy.”
Taken together, the observations from JADES-GS-z14-0 have upended astronomical predictions of what the earliest galaxies might have looked like after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
Given the relatively small part of the night sky they looked at, it is highly likely that even more luminous galaxies may be found in the coming years, said the researchers, who will now seek to publish their findings in a peer-reviewed magazine. .