Astronomers Just Discovered The Earliest Galaxy We’ve Ever Seen
A newly discovered galaxy has just smashed the record for the earliest seen yet, presenting a major challenge to our current models of galaxy formation.
It’s called JADES-GS-z14-0, and it’s brightly gleaming in the early Universe, as it looked less than 300 million years after the Big Bang. A second recent discovery, called JADES-GS-z14-1, was confirmed to be nearly as distant.
The detections, astronomers say, are now “unambiguous“, which means the Cosmic Dawn might have some ‘splainin’ to do.
“In January 2024, NIRSpec observed this galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0, for almost ten hours, and when the spectrum was first processed, there was unambiguous evidence that the galaxy was indeed at a redshift of 14.32, shattering the previous most-distant galaxy record,” said astronomers Stefano Carniani of Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy and Kevin Hainline of the University of Arizona.
