Astronomers Discover The Earliest Galaxy
A newly discovered galaxy has just broken the record for the earliest ever discovered, posing a serious challenge to current models of galaxy formation.
It’s called JADES-GS-z14-0, and it shines brightly in the early Universe, as it appeared less than 300 million years after the Big Bang.
The galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0 is estimated to be at least 1,600 light years across, indicating that most of the light comes from young stars rather than a massive black hole at its center. The galaxy’s mass is several hundred million times that of the Sun. That’s about 10% of the mass of our Milky Way galaxy.
James Webb has given us a glimpse into a time when the universe was shrouded in a fog of atomic hydrogen that scattered visible light and prevented scientists from peering into the depths of time. What it revealed defied terrestrial science. The dynamics of the evolution of stars and galaxies exceeded all theoretical calculations. In the galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, for example, so much dust and heavy elements (in astronomy, this is everything heavier than helium) were found that it cannot be explained today.
Overall, the galaxy suggests we need to rethink the early Universe, showing that a lot of the light sources we see there cannot be entirely explained by growing black holes.
