James Webb Space Telescope: New record for most distant galaxies
For years, the James Webb Space Telescope has been finding surprises in the early cosmos. Now it has once again pushed the boundary of the observable universe.
The new record holder among the most distant galaxies
(Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, R. Naidu (MIT), Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI))
The James Webb Space Telescope has once again broken a record: it has discovered and now confirmed the most distant galaxy. The galaxy, designated MoM-z14, has a redshift of 14.44, the heads of the space agencies ESA, NASA, and CSA have now announced. This means we are seeing it as it looked just 280 million years after the Big Bang. The distance of the galaxy, which was already discovered in early spring 2025, has been spectroscopically confirmed, write the operators of the space telescope. With this discovery, the state-of-the-art instrument has once again pushed the boundaries of the observable universe further towards the Big Bang.
Instrument raises new questions
MoM-z14 belongs to a growing group of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early universe, researchers recall. There are 100 times more of them than current models suggest should be possible. As with MoM-z1, unexpectedly large amounts of nitrogen have been detected in some of them. It is conceivable that supermassive stars, which could have produced the nitrogen, formed in the much denser environment relatively shortly after the Big Bang, writes the team. These would be stars of the very first population, which are currently being intensively searched for. However, there are still only various hypotheses in this regard. Every new discovery by the space telescope makes it clear how urgently they are needed.
For MoM-z14, there are also indications that it lies amidst a dense fog of hydrogen, which the earliest galaxies had to clear away to make the universe transparent. It was only during this reionization, several hundred million years after the Big Bang, that the translucent cosmos we know today emerged. During this "cosmic dawn", the first stars and galaxies separated the electrons from the hydrogen nuclei (the protons). They could then no longer absorb photons (i.e., light), and the universe became transparent. The James Webb Space Telescope was constructed with the stated goal of observing this process.
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The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 25, 2021, in such an ideal way that the saved fuel has enabled a doubling of the mission duration to 20 years. In early July 2022, the instrument began its research work and has since been making important and sometimes groundbreaking discoveries with great regularity. A number of its observations are challenging our assumptions about early history. For example, the instrument discovered tiny, extremely bright, and strikingly red points of light, which may not be surprisingly mature galaxies, but active black holes. Two years ago, an unexpectedly early collision of two exceptionally massive galaxies was also found.
(mho)
