A newly discovered galaxy has broken the record for oldest galaxy and poses a major challenge to our current models of galaxy formation. It is called JADES-GS-z14-0 and shines brightly in the early universe as it appeared less than 300 million years after the Big Bang. The second new discovery, called JADES-GS-z14-1, was confirmed to be equally distant.

Astronomers say the detections are now “conclusive,” meaning Cosmic Dawn may explain some.

“In January 2024, NIRSpec observed the galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0 for approximately ten hours, and when the spectrum was first processed there was clear evidence that the galaxy did indeed have a redshift of 14.32, breaking apart the previous largest galaxy. a record for a distant galaxy,” said astronomers Stefano Carniani of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Italy and Kevin Heinlein of the University of Arizona.

“Based on the images, the source was found to be more than 1,600 light-years across, proving that the light we see comes mostly from young stars rather than radiation near a growing supermassive black hole. Such starlight would mean the galaxy has a mass several hundred million times that of the Sun.” This begs the question: How can nature create such a bright, huge and massive galaxy in less than 300 million years?’

Three separate articles have been uploaded to the ArXiv preprint server. They haven’t been peer-reviewed yet, but all three come to the same conclusion. JADES-GS-z14-0 is certainly a bright data point that represents a new way to understand how the universe originally formed.

Until recently, we had little specific information about the period known as the Cosmic Dawn, the first billion years after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. This is because the early universe was filled with a haze of neutral hydrogen that scattered light and prevented it from propagating.

This fog did not last long; It was ionized and purified by the ultraviolet light shone by objects in the early universe, and by the end of the Cosmic Dawn, space became transparent. But back then there were a lot of stars and galaxies floating around. If we want to know how all this happened, we need to be able to see through the fog.

This is one of the things the JWST is designed to do with its powerful infrared eyes. Infrared radiation can pass through dense media while other light cannot; It can pass long waves with minimal scattering. He conducted the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), which looks for objects from the first 650 million years after the Big Bang, and obtained some very interesting results.

What we see over and over again is that large objects appear much earlier than we expected. This was surprising because we were working on the assumption that things like supermassive black holes and galaxies take a long time to form; much longer than the time we observe them.

But JADES-GS-z14-0 wins. So big and so bright; It’s not what astronomers predicted galaxies were like in the early universe. First, its size suggests that most of the light must come from stars rather than a burst of light from space around a growing supermassive black hole.

Analysis of its light indicates the presence of large amounts of dust and oxygen, which was unexpected this early. Such heavy elements must be created inside stars, which then explode. These properties suggest that several generations of massive stars must have existed and died out 300 million years after the Big Bang.

That’s not impossible, given that today’s largest stars have a lifespan of only a few million years, but it’s still not what astronomers expected to find.

Overall, the galaxy suggests that we need to rethink the early universe, showing that the abundance of light sources we see there cannot be fully explained by the growth of black holes. At the beginning of the Cosmic Dawn, somehow large, bright and well-formed galaxies may come together.

“JADES-GS-z14-0 is now becoming the archetype of this phenomenon,” says Carniani. “It’s amazing that the universe was able to create such a galaxy in just 300 million years.”