Jonathan Amos,science correspondent, @BBCAmos
NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Brant Robertson et al.The James Webb Space Telescope has broken its own record for detecting the most distant known galaxy.
This group of stars, known as JADES-GS-z14-0, was discovered only 290 million years after the Big Bang.
In other words, if the universe is 13.8 billion years old, this means that when we observe the Milky Way, the universe is only 2% of its current age.
Webb made the discovery using its massive 6.5m wide primary mirror and sensitive infrared instruments.
telescopic former record holder This is a galaxy as seen 325 million years after the Big Bang.
Astronomers say the most interesting aspect of the latest observations is not the vast distances involved (although surprising), but the size and brightness of JADES-GS-z14-0.
Webb measured the diameter of the Milky Way to be over 1,600 light-years. Many of the brightest galaxies generate most of their light through gas falling into supermassive black holes. But the ratio of JADES-GS-z14-0 shows that this is not the explanation in this case. Instead, researchers believe the light is produced by young stars.
“This amount of starlight means that the mass of the galaxy is hundreds of millions of times that of the sun! This raises the question: How did nature create such a bright, huge, and massive galaxy in less than 300 million years?” Weber said astronomers Stefano Cagnani and Kevin Heinlein.
Dr. Carniani is affiliated with the Scuola Normale in Pisa, Italy, and Dr. Hainline is from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.
$10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launches in 2021 This is a joint effort between U.S., European and Canadian space agencies.
It is specifically designed to see farther and further into the universe than any previous astronomical tool.
One of its main goals is to find the first stars to ignite in the newborn universe.
These giant objects may be hundreds of times more massive than the Sun and are composed solely of hydrogen and helium.
Theoretically they burned for a glorious but short life, forging within their nuclear cores the heavier chemical elements known to nature today.
In JADES-GS-z14-0, Webb could see large amounts of oxygen, which told researchers that the galaxy was quite mature.
Dr Cagnani and Dr Heinlein added: “The presence of oxygen early in the life of this galaxy is surprising and suggests that many generations of very massive stars were present before we observed this galaxy.”
The “JADES” in the object’s name stands for “JWST Advanced Deep Galactic Survey.” This is one of many observing programs using telescopes to probe the first hundreds of millions of years of the universe.
“z14” refers to “redshift 14”. Redshift is a term used by astronomers to describe distance.
It essentially measures how light from distant galaxies is stretched to longer wavelengths due to the expansion of the universe.
The greater the distance, the greater the stretch. Light from the earliest galaxies extends from ultraviolet and visible wavelengths into the infrared – a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that James Webb’s mirrors and instruments are specifically tuned for.
Professor Brent Robertson of the University of California, Santa Cruz said: “We can detect this galaxy even if it is ten times dimmer, which means we could see other examples earlier in the universe – possibly in The first 200 million years.
The JADES findings and their implications are being published in arXiv preprint service.
