Researchers recently observed a record-breaking galaxy beaming with young stars, which existed only 290 million years after the universe came into existence, challenging our view of the Cosmic Dawn with its unexpected luminosity. On Thursday, a team of astronomers the discovery of the most distant and earliest galaxy ever seen, observed at a time less than 300 million years after the Big Bang. That may not seem like a short period of time but considering that the Big Bang likely took place 13.
7 billion years ago, we’re looking at the cosmos during its infancy. This period, known as the Cosmic Dawn, spans from about 50 million to one billion years after the Big Bang, when the first stars, black holes, and galaxies formed in the universe. Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have .
As the light from these distant galaxies travels through space, it is stretched to longer wavelengths due to the expansion of the universe, shifting it to infrared light. The Webb Telescope is specifically designed to observe this infrared light. This latest discovery was initially made in October 2023.
A team of scientists discovered the galaxy, designated JADES-GS-z14-0, in the data that corresponded 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. Although the team was initially excited by the discovery, “there were some properties of the source that made us wary,” Stefano Carniani, an assistant professor at Scu.
