A new record by James Webb: NASA announced Thursday that a space telescope has pushed the limits of its observations even further by discovering the most distant galaxy ever discovered.
The US space agency explained that this galaxy, which existed only about 290 million years after the Big Bang, presents peculiarities that have “profound implications” for our understanding of the early ages of the universe.
This galaxy, called JADES-GS-z14-0, “is not the type of galaxy predicted by theoretical models and computer simulations in the very young universe,” Stefano Cargnani and Kevin, researchers involved in the discovery, announced in a press release. .
“We are thrilled to see the extraordinary diversity of galaxies that existed at cosmic dawn!” they added.
In astronomy, seeing far away means going back in time. For example, it takes eight minutes for sunlight to reach us, so we see it as it was eight minutes ago. By looking as far as possible, we can thus perceive things as they were billions of years ago.
But the light from very distant objects stretched out until it reached us, and “reddened” along the way, passing to a wavelength invisible to the naked eye: infrared.
The peculiarity of James Webb, one of whose main tasks is to explore the very young Universe, is to work only in the infrared.
Since its launch in December 2021, the telescope has already observed galaxies and then declared them to be the most distant galaxies ever discovered. But the news he announced on Thursday saw him break his own record.
The light from this new galaxy took more than 13.5 billion years to reach us (the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago).
But it is “exceptionally bright given its distance,” according to NASA. It is estimated that its mass is several hundred million times the mass of the Sun.
“This begs the question: How could nature create such a luminous, massive and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?” the two researchers asked.
A gem of engineering, the James Webb Telescope is stationed 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and is used for observations by scientists around the world.
