The hits keep coming with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. According to the space agency, JWST discovered the most distant galaxy ever known. The strikingly named JADES-GS-z14-0 galaxy is said to have formed just 290 million years after the Big Bang, but it has some unique characteristics that conflict with that notion.
The galaxy is incredibly large, measuring up to 1,600 light-years across. This galaxy is also very bright and features an unusual amount of starlight, considering how quickly it formed after the Big Bang. This led researchers Stefano Carniani and Kevin Hainline to ask the question, “How can nature create such a bright, massive, massive galaxy in less than 300 million years?” In cosmic time it is hardly a blip.
Wavelengths of light emitted from JADES-GS-z14-0 captured by JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) indicate the presence of strong ionized gas emissions due to abundant hydrogen and oxygen. This is also strange because oxygen is generally not present in the early days of galaxies. This suggests that “several generations of very massive stars were already living out their lives before we observed the galaxy.”
As always with distant space matter, we are actually seeing the past due to the speed of light. That means the galaxy has created multiple generations of massive stars in less than 290 million years. Stars “only” take about 10 million years to form, but they can take up to 20 billion years to die. However, supermassive stars typically have shortened lifespans. So while this discovery doesn’t exactly rewrite our understanding of the universe, it does raise questions about the nature of star formation early in the universe.
“All these observations tell us that JADES-GS-z14-0 is not the same type of galaxy predicted to exist in the early universe by theoretical models and computer simulations,” the researchers told NASA. “With Webb, astronomers will likely discover many of these brilliant galaxies much earlier in the next decade.”
The Webb Telescope has made a habit of redefining our understanding of the universe. It showed the birth of stars in the constellation Virgo, the discovery of the first water orbiting a comet, and the first discovery of carbon dioxide on a distant exoplanet. All of this took place within two years of operation, so who knows what the future holds.
