James Webb breaks his own record and discovers these two new "impossible" galaxies

The recent discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) promise to transform our understanding of the Universe. By exploring the depths of space, the telescope has revealed the two oldest and most distant galaxies ever observed, dating from approximately 300 million years after the Big Bang.


These two galaxies, named JADES-GS-z14-0 and JADES-GS-z14-1, break the previous record also set by the JWST last year. Those prior discoveries dated from 330 million years after the birth of the Universe.

In addition to being exceptionally old, these galaxies are surprisingly large for such an early period of cosmic history. The larger of the two, JADES-GS-z14-0, spans approximately 1,600 light-years in diameter. This discovery, published on May 28 on the preprint server arXiv, suggests that the early galaxies of the Universe grew much faster than current cosmological theories predict.


These galaxies were spotted in a region of space known as the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field. Previous observations with the Hubble telescope had already revealed galaxies dating from the first 800 million years of the Universe, but the light from even older galaxies, red-shifted to infrared wavelengths as it crosses the expanding Universe, required the powerful instruments of the JWST.

The impressive size and brightness of JADES-GS-z14-0 are likely fueled by young stars in active formation, rather than by a supermassive black hole. By studying the wavelengths of light emitted by the galaxy, the team detected signs of hydrogen atoms and potentially oxygen in the surrounding gas, which are characteristics of star-forming galaxies.

These discoveries show that the JWST can detect galaxies even if their light is ten times fainter, offering hope that the telescope will soon reveal even older objects, perhaps dating back to the first 200 million years of cosmic history.