By Dean Murray via SWNS
The most distant known galaxy has been discovered.
Existing only 290 million years after the big bang, the find by the James Webb Space Telescope, the world’s most powerful, shatters its own record.
The galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0, was spotted by scientists who have used the telescope over the last two years to explore what astronomers refer to as Cosmic Dawn – the period in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang where the first galaxies were born.
In October 2023 and January 2024, an international team used Webb to observe galaxies as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program.
Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph), scientists obtained a spectrum of a record-breaking galaxy observed only two hundred and ninety million years after the Big Bang. This corresponds to a redshift of about 14, which is a measure of how much a galaxy’s light is stretched by the expansion of the Universe.
The previous known most distant galaxy was JADES-GS-z13-0, believed to have formed 325 million years after the Big Bang.
The new data, announced Thursday (May 30) is from Webb Science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.
