Astronomers Have Detected a Galaxy Millions of Years Older Than Any Previously Observed

With help of the James Webb space telescopeA team of astronomers broke the oldest and most distant record galaxy detected to date by humans.

In a preliminary studyAwaiting peer exam and publication in a review, astronomers describe this primitive galaxy, giving it the name Mom Z14. According to the researchers’ calculations, this “cosmic miracle” caused 280 million years after the Big Bang, beating the record set by La Discovery last year from Jades-GS-Z14-0, a galaxy created 290 million years after the origin of the universe.

To put these measures in context, the current age of the universe is estimated at 13.8 billion years. The land is about 4.543 billion years old. No one expected the James Webb space telescope to have the potential to observe things so close at the Big Bang age only three and a half years after the launch.

A brief reminder of distances from space-time. Because light moves at a finished speed of 300,000 meters per second, and because space develops, the observation of light from very distant objects is equivalent to what they looked like a long time ago. For example, when we say that Mom Z14 is about 13.5 billion years, it means that you should travel 13.5 billion years at the speed of light to reach its destination. Until now, there is no point detected by a more distant scientific instrument, and at the same time, older, than this one.

The James Webb space telescope, with its ability to look deep into the distant space, allows us to study certain aspects of the universe in its early days. How does that do this? By infrared sensors. Due to the expansion of the universe, almost all the galaxies that we see from the earth move away from us. Thus, from our point of view, their light seems to have a longer wavelength because it is stretched by this movement. We call it “Red offset“: Their wavelengths are redder because they are longer, and thus move towards the red end of the light spectrum. The more an object was created earlier, and therefore the more it is distant, after having developed outwards for a longer period, the greater the Redshift.

The James Webb space telescope was able to determine that Mom Z14 is 50 times smaller than the Milky Way, and has also detected the presence of nitrogen and carbon in the galaxy. This is significant because, despite only 280 million years more than Big Bang, this shows that Mom Z14 does not belong to the first generation of galaxies formed, because the stars of these galaxies would only be made up of hydrogen and helium, the elements which mainly constituted the early universe. Heavier elements did not arrive until laterAfter being produced in stars.

Can the James Webb cross this threshold and find the first generation of galaxies? Such discoveries could be far away, but we have to continue to find.

This story originally appeared on Cable in Spanish and was translated from Spanish.