James Webb finds the farthest galaxy just 290 million light years from the Big Bang
Every now and then, media outlets around the world feature in their headlines a news story that seems to be repeating itself: the discovery of the “most distant” galaxy in the universe. The news has returned to the front page again and again over the years. … This is true, but although it seems the same, it is not. The main difference is that each discovery surpasses the previous one, and its protagonists, the distant galaxies, are further away from us and therefore closer to the Big Bang, erroneously called the “big bang”, which gave birth to the Universe itself 13,760 years ago. million years.
Obviously, although these headlines are always repeated with slight variations, behind them there is a huge scientific effort to create tools and develop ever better strategies that can go further, just a little further, than previous ones. The latest of these instruments was, of course, the James Webb Space Telescope, which over the past two years has allowed astronomers to observe, as never before, what they call the “cosmic dawn,” a distant period. , several hundred million years after the Big Bang, which created the first galaxies.
Observing these galaxies reveals a treasure trove of vital information about how dense gas clouds, the galaxies themselves, and black holes behaved when the Universe was extremely young. Since its launch in late 2021, James Webb has been finding increasingly distant galaxies and is therefore attracting a good collection of headlines.
And now he’s done it again. In fact, in October 2023 and January 2024, an international team of astronomers used the telescope to observe distant galaxies as part of the JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) program. And thanks to one of their instruments (NIRSpec, a near-infrared spectrograph), scientists discovered a galaxy that once again broke all distance records. The galaxy, cataloged as JADES-GS-z14-0 (boxed with image), is just 290 million years from the Big Bang. That is, at a distance of 13.47 billion light years from Earth.
Of course, in this crazy race to make observations further and further, the main goal is to find out exactly when the Universe was able to “manufacture” the first galaxies. The race, by the way, has already brought more than one surprise and even threatens to shake the very foundations of our understanding of Space.
monstrous holes
Against all odds, for example, James Webb had already encountered, in the most tender infancy of the Universe, perfectly formed galaxies, large, mature and similar to ours, instead of the expected irregular and ill-defined nebulae, which only given enough time should become similar to those who surrounds us today. It would be like meeting an almost newborn child, already six feet tall, with a beard and a muscular, perfectly proportioned body.
But that is not all. At the same time, the telescope also discovered black holes with billions of times the mass of the Sun, so huge that, according to current theories, they would not have grown to this point since the Big Bang.
How do we explain these mature galaxies and these monstrous black holes in the infancy of the Universe? It is clear that there is something that we are missing, that we have not yet fully understood. That is why it is so important to be able to look a little further each time, each time a little closer to the source.
With each new milestone, with each galaxy further and further away, the answers to astronomers’ questions become a little closer. The prize will be a better understanding of how the Universe we live in came into being and evolved from the very beginning. Something that is definitely worth it, even if we have to keep repeating the headlines.