NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope spotted the earliest and most distant galaxy known to researchers, according to a news release from the space agency.
The galaxy was spotted as astronomers and scientists studied what’s known as “Cosmic Dawn,” or the era right after the Big Bang when early galaxies were formed. Early galaxies can tell researchers about how gas, stars and black holes formed and changed when the universe was very young, NASA said, and this first galaxy provides even more unique insight.
The galaxy was observed just 290 million years after the Big Bang. Researchers have already found hundreds of galaxies from about 650 million years after the event. This distant galaxy was observed for the first time in early 2023 and photographed in October of that year. In January 2024, a James Webb Space Telescope camera spent ten hours observing the galaxy, known as JADES-GS-z14-0.
Scientists found that the galaxy had a redshift, or wavelength of light, that showed just how far away it was from Earth.
“Seeing this spectrum was incredibly exciting for the whole team,” said Stefano Carniani from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, and Kevin Hainline from the University of Arizona in the NASA news release. “This discovery was not just a new distance record for our team; the most important aspect of JADES-GS-z14-0 was that at this distance, we know that this galaxy must be intrinsically very luminous.”
Researchers were able to determine that the light source seen by the telescope is over 1,600 light-years across, proving that it is from “young stars” and not from a black hole. The amount of starlight seen, Carniani and Hainline said, “implies that the galaxy is several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun.”
Some of the light seen in the galaxy is reddened by dust, and instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope detected wavelengths that indicate the presence of strong ionized gas emissions, including hydrogen and oxygen. The presence of oxygen “is a surprise and suggests that multiple generations of very massive stars had already lived their lives before we observed the galaxy,” Carniani and Hainline said.
The scientists said it’s possible that other researchers will detect even more luminous galaxies using the James Webb Space Telescope. Those galaxies may be from even earlier in the Cosmic Dawn and teach astronomers about the foundation of the universe.
