The James Webb Space Telescope broke its own record by detecting the most distant galaxy ever known.
Called JADES-GS-z14-0, the star cluster was seen as it existed just 290 million years after the Big Bang.
In other words, if the universe is 13 billion years old, that means we are observing the galaxy when the cosmos was barely 2% of its current age.
Webb used his massive 6.5-meter primary mirror and sensitive infrared instruments to make the discovery.
Astronomers comment that the most interesting aspects of the most recent observation are not so much the distance in question – incredible as it may be – but the size and brilliance of JADES-GS-z14-0.
Webb measured the galaxy to be more than 1,600 light years from end to end. Many of the most luminous galaxies generate most of their light through gas falling into a supergiant black hole.
But the JADES-GS-z14-0 scale indicates that that is not the explanation in this case. Researchers believe, instead, that the light is being produced by young stars.
“This large amount of starlight implies that the galaxy has several hundred million times more mass than the Sun! “Which begs the question: How can nature create such a luminous, massive and enormous galaxy in less than 300 million years?” said Webb astronomers Stefano Carniani and Kevin Hainline.
Carniani is affiliated with the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, and Hainline is with the University of Arizona in Tucson (USA).
The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched in 2021 as a joint venture between the US, European and Canadian space agencies.
It was specifically designed to explore much deeper into the cosmos and see much further back in time than any other astronomical tool.
One of its key objectives is to find the very first stars that exploded during the birth of the universe.
These gigantic objects, perhaps many hundreds of times larger than our Sun, were composed only of hydrogen and helium.
It is theorized that they lived lives that burned brightly but briefly, forging within their nuclear centers the heaviest chemical elements known in nature today.
Webb can see a considerable amount of oxygen in JADES-GS-z14-0, which tells researchers that the galaxy is already quite mature.
“The presence of oxygen so early in the life of this galaxy is a surprise and suggests that multiple generations of very large stars had already ended their lives before we observed the galaxy,” Carniani and Hainline added.
The acronym JADES in the name of the object corresponds in English to “JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey.”
It is one of several observing programs that use the telescope to probe the first few hundred million years of the cosmos.
“z14” refers to “Redshift 14”. redshift is the term astronomers use to describe distances.
It is essentially a measure of how light emanating from a distant galaxy has been stretched into longer waves by the expansion of the universe.
The greater the distance, the greater the stretch.
The light from the first galaxies was stretched from ultraviolet and visible waves to infrared waves, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum for which James Webb’s mirrors and instruments have been specifically tuned.
“We would have been able to detect this galaxy even if it were 10 times dimmer, which means we could see other even earlier examples in the universe; probably in the first 200 million years,” said Professor Brant Robertson of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The discovery of JADES and its implications are described in a series of specialized papers published on Cornell University’s arXiv preprint service that you can read in English here.
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