An international team of scientists has used the James Webb Space Telescope to detect light from the most distant galaxy ever discovered, MoM-z14, which formed just 280 million years after the Big Bang. This discovery pushes the boundary of the observable Universe even further back in time and provides unique insight into the earliest stages of galaxy formation. A preprint of the work has been published on the arXiv portal.
The galaxy was found as part of the Mirage spectroscopic survey, which is aimed at confirming candidates for highly redshifted objects. The redshift of z = 14.4, at which the galaxy MoM-z14 is located, means that the light from this galaxy has traveled to us for more than 13.5 billion years.
The galaxy MoM-z14 is exceptionally bright, but does not contain an active nucleus, which indicates the presence of supermassive stars predicted by the theory of the early Universe. Its chemical composition – especially the high nitrogen-to-carbon ratio – is similar to the oldest stars in the Milky Way and globular clusters. All this may indicate that the stars of MoM-z14 and the stars of our galaxy had similar birth conditions.
Before the launch of James Webb, scientists had virtually no tools to observe such distant objects: the Hubble telescope saw only one object aged ~500 million years, and Spitzer had too small a mirror. Webb has a 6.5-meter mirror and advanced IR detectors, allowing us to “lift the curtain” on the first eras of space.
“Webb has already found amazingly bright distant galaxies, which has caused a real surge of interest and many new questions about the formation of galaxies in the first 500 million years,” the authors of the study noted.
If the Roman space telescope is launched in the future, hundreds of such objects are expected to be discovered, which will confirm or revise current theories.
