WASHINGTON: NASA announced on Thursday that the James Webb Space Telescope has found what seems to be the most distant galaxy ever seen. This very bright star system existed just 290 million years after the Big Bang.
The Webb telescope which started working in 2022 has helped scientists make many new discoveries. It can see very far into space, which also means it can look back in time. This latest discovery is very important for understanding the beginning of the universe known as the Cosmic Dawn.
Astronomers from different countries first saw the galaxy called JADES-GS-z14-0 in early 2023. They needed more observations to make sure it was really the most distant galaxy ever found. They said in a statement “The source was surprisingly bright, which we wouldn’t expect for such a distant galaxy and it was very close to another galaxy such that the two appeared to be part of one larger object.”
Webb, you outdid yourself. @NASAWebb has found what appears to be the most distant known galaxy—beating its own previous record. This galaxy first formed less than 300 million years after the big bang. https://t.co/taTBOFRbyq pic.twitter.com/r0rhcdmFcz
— NASA (@NASA) May 30, 2024
Stefano Carniani from Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy and Kevin Hainline from the University of Arizona explained this discovery. Light from distant galaxies takes a long time to reach Earth and is stretched out, shifting to the infrared part of the light spectrum. The Webb telescope can see this infrared light very clearly. The team did two more observations in October and January to confirm their findings. They used Webb’s primary camera called NIRCam and another tool called NIRSpec which analyses light to learn about an object’s properties.
This new galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0 is even older than the previous record-holder JADES-GS-z13-0 which existed 320 million years after the Big Bang. This raises new questions for scientists.
Carniani and Hainline said, “The most important aspect of JADES-GS-z14-0 was that at this distance, we know that this galaxy must be very bright.” The galaxy is about 1,600 light years across, and its light mostly comes from young stars, not from a growing supermassive black hole.
The researchers added, “This starlight implies that the galaxy is several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun!”
These findings change what scientists thought early galaxies might have looked like after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
