With the help From the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers broke the record for the oldest, farthest galaxy that has so far been detected by humans.
In a pre -print study, which is still awaiting peer review and publication in a magazine, astronomers describe this primitive galaxy, giving it the name Mom Z14. According to the researchers’ calculations, this’ cosmic wonder ‘arose 280 million years after the Big Bang, and the record set by the discovery, just last year of Jades-GS-Z14-0, created a galaxy 290 million years after the origin of the universe.
To put these measurements in context, the current age of the universe is estimated at 13.8 billion years. Earth has a roughly age of 4.543 billion years. No one expected the James Webb Space Telescope to have the potential to see things so close to the big bang just three and a half years after the launch.
A brief reminder of distances relative to spacecraft. Because light moves with a finite velocity of 300,000 meters per second, and because the space expands, the light of many far objects is equal to seeing how it was long ago. For example, if we say Mom Z14 is about 13.5 billion years old, it means traveling 13.5 billion years with the velocity of light to achieve it. So far, no point has been detected by a scientific instrument further and at the same time older than this.
The James Webb Space Telescope, with the ability to look deep into the distant space, enables us to study some aspects of the universe in the early stages. How does it do it? By infrared sensors. Due to the expansion of the universe, almost all the galaxies we see from the earth move away from us. So, from our point of view, their light seems to have a longer wavelength because it is stretched by this movement. We call it ‘red shift’: their wavelengths are redder because it is longer, and thus shifts to the red end of the light spectrum. The earlier an object was created, which is why it is further, the further it has expanded longer, the greater the red shift.
The James Webb Space Telescope could determine that Mom Z14 is 50 times smaller than the Milky Way, and also detected the presence of nitrogen and carbon in the galaxy. This is significant, because despite the fact that they are only 280 million years older than the Big, it shows that Mom Z14 does not belong to the first generation of galaxies formed, as stars in these galaxies consist only of hydrogen and helium, the elements that consistently consisted of the early universe. Heavier elements arrived only later after being produced in stars.
Can the James Webb cross that threshold and find the first generation galaxies? Such discoveries may be far, but we must keep watching.
This story originally appears on Wire And Español and was translated from Spanish.