O NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope managed to capture records of a galaxy formed just 290 million years after the Big Bang, becoming the oldest and most distant galaxy known to astronomers.
The galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0 not only broke the distance and age record, but also demonstrated another particularity: it is extremely bright, and therefore can be observed even from so far away.
According to scientists, this light comes mainly from young stars, which would indicate that the galaxy has hundreds of millions of times the mass of our Sun.
This fact raised a question for researchers: how was nature able to create such a bright, massive and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?
Over the past two years, the James Webb Telescope has been used to explore what astronomers call the Cosmic Aurora — the period in which the first galaxies were born a few hundred million years after the Big Bang — with the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic program Survey (JADES).
These galaxies can provide essential information for understanding how gases, stars and black holes behaved in the early universe.
The JADES-GS-z14-0 observations also appear to indicate the presence of ionized gas in the form of bright lines of hydrogen and oxygen emission — and this indicates that multiple generations of massive stars have lived (and died) before we were able to observe them. them in the galaxy.
These data show that the oldest galaxy ever observed by us differs from theoretical models and computer simulations that try to guess what the beginning of the universe was like.
James Webb Telescope captures image of most distant star ever seen
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