Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has beaten its own record for detecting and photographing the most distant known galaxy.
The newly-discovered galaxy is called JADES-GS-z14-0, and is the earliest ever seen collection of stars in the universe.
The telescope, which makes even the best cameras for astrophotography look like children's toys, captured the galaxy as it was 290 million years after the Big Bang, meaning that if the universe is 13.8 billion years old, we’re observing the galaxy when the cosmos was only 2 percent of its current age.
This is not only an incredible scientific and technological achievement, but it could also unlock the mysteries of how the universe began.
The James Webb Space Telescope, named after James E. Webb, the administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968, uses its huge 6.5m wide primary mirror and high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments to view objects too old, distant or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope.
According to scientists at NASA, the JADES-GS-z14-0 appears to be surprisingly bright and 1,600 light years across.
A light-year is the distance light travels in one year - and that's a big big distance. Light whizzes through interstellar space at 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometres) per second, and therefore a 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometres) per year.
Scientists use the unit to measure light because it allows astronomers to determine how far back they are viewing. Because light takes time to travel to our eyes, what we are viewing in the night sky has already happened. When you are observing something one light year away, you’re seeing it exactly as it appeared one year ago.
The galaxy is so bright it is believed to be several hundreds of million times the mass of our Sun, and scientists are perplexed as to how nature could have created it in less than 300 million years. The telescope also detected a significant amount of oxygen, suggesting that the galaxy is quite mature.
Drs Stefano Carniani and Kevin Hainline, authors of the report said:
“The presence of oxygen so early in the life of this galaxy is a surprise and suggests that multiple generations of very massive stars had already lived their lives before we observed the galaxy.”
Over the last couple of years, scientists have used the telescope to explore what astronomers mysteriously call Cosmic Dawn - the period of the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang, where the first galaxies were born.
