The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has set another record by discovering the most distant galaxy known to date. The object, named MoM-z14, glowed only 280 million years after the Big Bang. This discovery is once again forcing scientists to reconsider ideas about the early stages of the Universe.
The galaxy was discovered as part of the Mirage program, which searches for and verifies the oldest cosmic structures. Its redshift is z≈14.4, indicating a colossal distance and extreme antiquity. The MoM-z14 light traveled to us for more than 13.5 billion years, stretched out in the expansion of the Universe.
A team of researchers from MIT published their findings on the arXiv preprint server and submitted them to the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
Absence of black holes
The galaxy’s brightness is no less surprising — it far exceeds astronomers’ expectations. This puts it among other extremely bright and massive objects in the early Universe, such as JADES-GS-z14-0. Both galaxies show signs of intense star formation, but show no evidence of supermassive black hole activity. Their structure consists predominantly of compact clusters of young luminaries.
These discoveries challenge current cosmological models, which assumed a much slower rate of formation of the first galaxies. Scientists cannot yet explain how the Universe was able to create such bright and massive star systems so soon after its origin.
Chemical composition
An intriguing feature of MoM-z14 is its chemical composition — it contains a high amount of nitrogen relative to carbon. This rare ratio has already been found in ancient globular clusters in the Milky Way. According to the researchers, this similarity may indicate the existence of supermassive stars in the first epochs of cosmic time and the continuity of the star-forming environment for more than 13 billion years.
MoM-z14 also reflects a likely trend: the separation of early galaxies into two types — compact nitrogen-rich and diffuse nitrogen-poor galaxies. Representatives of the first group have received the unofficial name Little Red Dots – because of their tiny size and saturated color, which signals large amounts of heavy elements.
James Webb’s acute vision
The key to such discoveries was James Webb’s unique infrared “vision,” which far exceeds the capabilities of previous Hubble or Spitzer observatories. Thanks to JWST, astronomers can not only find the oldest galaxies, but also study their structure, chemical composition and morphology.
A prime example of the benefits of JWST was galaxy EGS23205, previously thought to be a structureless spot. But the new images showed a distinct spiral lattice in it, a complex shape that the Universe was thought to have acquired much later.
The gravitational lensing effect also helps the telescope look deep into the universe. This effect occurs when massive galaxy clusters bend and amplify light from distant objects behind. Thanks to this method, scientists were able to see galaxies that appeared as early as 350 million years after the Big Bang. In particular, observations in the vicinity of the Abell 2744 cluster, known as the Pandora Cluster, have opened up access to objects that would otherwise remain invisible.
In the future, scientists hope to supplement the observations with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Observatory. But even now, JWST is already fundamentally changing our ideas about when and how the first stars and galaxies appeared in the Universe.
Earlier we reported on how astronomers revealed the secret behind the small red spots in James Webb’s images.
According to Big Think
