NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the oldest and most distant galaxy known to researchers, according to a statement from the space agency.
The galaxy was spotted as astronomers and scientists studied what is known as the “Cosmic Dawn,” or the era just after the Big Bang when the first galaxies formed. The first galaxies can tell researchers how gas, stars and black holes formed and changed when the universe was very young, NASA said, and this first galaxy provides an even more unique insight.
The galaxy was observed only 290 million years after the Big Bang. Researchers have already found hundreds of galaxies about 650 million years after the event. This distant galaxy was first observed in early 2023 and photographed in October of that year. In January 2024, a camera on the James Webb Space Telescope 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 how far it was from Earth.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA)
“Seeing this spectrum was incredibly exciting for the whole team,” Stefano Carniani of the Escola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, and Kevin Hainline of the University of Arizona said in the NASA press release. “This discovery wasn't 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 bright”.
The researchers were able to determine that the light source seen by the telescope is more than 1,600 light-years across, proving that it comes from “young stars” and not a black hole. The amount of starlight seen, Carniani and Hainline said, “implies that the galaxy is several hundred million 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 emissions from strongly ionized gases, including hydrogen and oxygen. The presence of oxygen “is a surprise and suggests that several generations of very massive stars had already lived out their lives before the galaxy was observed,” Carniani and Hainline said.
The scientists said it is possible for other researchers to detect even more luminous galaxies using the James Webb Space Telescope. These galaxies may even predate the Cosmic Dawn and teach astronomers about the foundation of the universe.
