Image Reveals the Most Distant Galaxy Ever Seen, From Just 280 Million Years After the Big Bang
The James Webb Space Telescope's latest find is yet another record-breaker: the most distant galaxy ever detected, shining just 280 million years after the Big Bang.
Named MoM-z14 (cue the 'your mama's so old' jokes), the galaxy was spotted by JWST as part of the Mirage (or Miracle) survey, a program designed to confirm the identities of early galaxies. MoM-z14 clocks in at a redshift of z = 14.4, meaning its light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe by more than 14 times, and offering a clue to its age. The team of researchers, led by MIT's Rohan Naidu, posted its findings to the preprint server arXiv and has submitted them to the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
This galaxy isn't just some dim smudge, either—it's unexpectedly luminous, echoing a growing theme in JWST's discoveries. MoM-z14 now joins a strange new class of young galaxies that shine far more brightly than anyone expected. JADES-GS-z14-0, discovered in a separate deep field survey, similarly stunned astronomers with its size and brilliance, spanning 1,600 light-years and harboring hundreds of millions of solar masses in stars.
Like JADES-GS-z14-0, MoM-z14 doesn't appear to be powered by a supermassive black hole, but rather by dense populations of young, luminous stars. The brightness of these objects challenges existing models of how quickly the universe could form stars and galaxies after the Big Bang.
JWST's piercing infrared gaze exceeds the abilities of the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes to peer so far back in time. The leap in capability is making it possible for Webb scientists not just to detect early galaxies, but to discern their structure and composition in surprising detail.
For example, EGS23205—a barred spiral galaxy seen by both Hubble and JWST—appeared faint and featureless in the telescope's earlier images. But JWST revealed a clear stellar bar at its center, upending assumptions that spiral galaxies—and their intricate structures—took billions of years to evolve.
Gravitational lensing is also helping JWST peer even deeper. In the case of the ancient galaxies found near the Abell 2744 cluster (nicknamed 'Pandora's Cluster'), light from early galaxies—some just 350 million years post-Big Bang—is bent and magnified by intervening mass, allowing astronomers to glimpse primordial cosmic objects that would otherwise be invisible. These faint light sources, magnified by the cluster's immense gravity, offer an intimate view of the early universe and have become essential to deep-field astronomy.
MoM-z14's chemical signature adds another wrinkle to the universe's story: it's rich in nitrogen relative to carbon—a trait shared by ancient globular clusters around the Milky Way that may have once hosted supermassive stars, according to the research. That resemblance hints at a continuity in star-forming environments stretching across more than 13 billion years.
It may also reflect a broader trend—the paper notes a split among early galaxies between compact, nitrogen-rich sources like MoM-z14, and more disparate, nitrogen-poor ones. The former may define a new class of Little Red Dots, as Universe Today reports, blazing with clues about the universe's first bursts of star formation.
While future observatories like the Roman Space Telescope may reveal even more of these early cosmic oddities, JWST has already rewritten the timeline of galaxy formation. Based on its current pace, the telescope will almost certainly break its own record again soon.
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