James Webb telescope spots earliest known galaxy

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just broken its own record by spotting the earliest known galaxy to date.

The spotted galaxy existed just 280 million years after the Big Bang and is "the most distant spectroscopically confirmed source to date,” researchers said in a new study.

The galaxy is called MoM-z14 and was first spotted by JWST in 2023, but has just been confirmed as the earliest ever seen. It makes it "the mother of all early galaxies.”

JWST started its operations in 2022 and has since spotted far more ancient galaxies than expected, putting in question previous beliefs about the universe’s infancy.

“This unexpected population has electrified the community and raised fundamental questions about galaxy formation in the first 500 [million years after the Big Bang]," the authors wrote.

MoM-z14 is 240 light-years across, some 400 times smaller than our own galaxy - meaning it’s rather small for the amount of light it emits. The researchers observed it during a burst of rapid star formation.

MoM-z14 appears similar to globular clusters observed in the Milky Way, meaning that stars formed in an analogous way even during these early stages of the universe.

Scientists are still looking to confirm more high redshift galaxies with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA's future infrared space observatory that will attempt to tackle some of the most pressing questions about the universe, set to launch by May 2027.

But even before then, JWST is optimistic about breaking its own record:

"JWST itself appears poised to drive a series of great expansions of the cosmic frontier," the authors wrote. "Previously unimaginable redshifts, approaching the era of the very first stars, no longer seem far away."

The presence of carbon and nitrogen in MoM z14 means that there are even earlier galaxies that can still be discovered. That is because such early galaxies were only filled with the simplest elements like hydrogen and helium - the presence of heavier elements puts MoM z14 in the category of the first “normal” galaxies.