New record for James Webb: the space telescope has further pushed the limits of its observations by detecting the most distant galaxy ever discovered, NASA announced Thursday.
This galaxy, which existed only about 290 million years after the Big Bang, presents particularities with “profound implications” for our understanding of the early ages of the Universe, explained the American space agency.
Named JADES-GS-z14-0, it “is not the kind of galaxy predicted by theoretical models and computer simulations in the very young Universe,” two researchers involved in this discovery, Stefano Carniani and Kevin, declared in a press release. Hainlin.
“We are delighted to see the extraordinary diversity of galaxies that existed at the cosmic dawn! “, they added.
In astronomy, seeing far means going back in time. For example, light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach us, and we therefore see it as it was eight minutes ago. By looking as far as possible, we can therefore perceive objects as they did billions of years ago.
But the light emitted by very distant objects stretched until it reached us, and “reddened” along the way, passing into a wavelength invisible to the naked eye: infrared.
The particularity of James Webb, one of whose main missions is to explore the very young Universe, is to only operate in the infrared.
Since its launch in December 2021, the telescope had already observed galaxies then declared the most distant ever detected. But the news announced Thursday makes him break his own record.
The light from this new galaxy took more than 13.5 billion years to reach us (the Big Bang took place 13.8 billion years ago).
But it is “exceptionally bright given its distance”, according to NASA. And it is estimated that its mass is several hundred million times that of the Sun.
“This begs the question: How could nature create such a luminous, massive, and large galaxy in less than 300 million years? », questioned the two researchers.
A gem of engineering, the James Webb Telescope is stationed 1.5 million kilometers from Earth and used for observations by scientists around the world.