JWST discovers most distant galaxy ever, pushing boundaries of the observable universe
Galaxy MoM-z14 may provide clues to what the universe looked like in its infancy
The most distant galaxy ever discovered, MoM-z14.
NASA/ESA/CSA/STSCI/Rohan Naidu/MIT (image); Joseph DePasquale/STSCI (image processing)
In a galaxy far, far away lie clues to the cosmic dawn – the first few hundreds of millions of years in the early history of our 13.8 billion-year-old universe. on astronomers on Wednesday A bright galaxy announced Called MoM-z14, it was found using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most distant telescope ever discovered, existing only 280 million years after the Big Bang.
“With the Web, we are able to see more of humans than ever before, and it looks nothing like we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting,” said Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the study. preprint paper Details of the discovery of MoM-z14 to be published soon in the journal Overlay Open Journal of Astrophysics, NASA announced in a statement.
The galaxy whose light took more than 13 billion years to reach our telescopes Brighter, denser and chemically richer than astronomers expectedAccording to NASA.
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To pinpoint galaxies like MoM-z14, astronomers use redshift. Essentially, it is a measure of how much light coming from an object is stretched, resulting in that object moving away from our perspective as the universe expands. The higher the redshift, the more distant the object is. In the case of MoM-z14, its redshift is 14.4—a record, scientific American Columnist Phil Plait noted late last year.
But records are made only to be broken. And NASA said it fully expects this new JWST achievement to be surpassed in the near future as its observations improve.
Regardless, MoM-z14 may provide new clues to the early universe, for example, why this and other early galaxies are so bright.
Yijia Li, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University who also contributed to the research, said in the same statement, “This is an incredibly exciting time, with the Web revealing the early universe like never before,” and showing us how much there is still to discover.
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