The hits keep coming with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. According to the space agency, JWST has found a new the most distant known galaxy always. The charmingly named JADES-GS-z14-0 galaxy is said to have formed just 290 million years after the big bang, but it has some unique features that contradict this notion.
The galaxy is incredibly large, 1600 light years across. It is also very bright and has an unusual amount of starlight given how quickly it formed after the big bang. This led researchers Stefano Carniani and Kevin Hainline to ask, “How could nature create such a bright, massive and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?” prompted him to ask the question. In spacetime, it’s just a blip.
The wavelengths of light emitted from JADES-GS-z14-0, as detected by JWST’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), indicate strong emissions of ionized gas, likely from abundant hydrogen and oxygen. This is also strange because oxygen is not normally present in galactic life. This suggests that “several generations of very massive stars have already lived out their lives before we can observe the galaxy.”
As usual in deep space, we are actually looking back at the speed of light, which means that the galaxy has produced multiple generations of massive stars in less than 290 million years. Stars “only” take about ten million years to form, but can take up to 20 billion years to die. However, ultra-massive stars typically have shorter lifetimes. So this finding doesn’t exactly rewrite our understanding of the cosmos, but it certainly calls into question the nature of star formation in the early life of the universe.
“Together, these observations show us that JADES-GS-z14-0 does not resemble the types of galaxies predicted by theoretical models and computer simulations to have existed in the very early universe,” the researchers told NASA. “It is likely that astronomers will find many more such bright galaxies with Webb in the next decade, perhaps even earlier.”
Webb made the telescope a habit redefining our understanding of space. He showed us Stars born in Virgofound water for the first time orbiting a comet and discovered carbon dioxide on a distant exoplanet, this was a first. All this has been accomplished in less than two years, who knows what the future will bring.
