The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has topped itself once again, delivering on its promise to push the boundaries of the observable Universe closer to cosmic dawn with the confirmation of a bright galaxy that existed 280 million years after the Big Bang.
By now Webb has established that it will eventually surpass virtually every benchmark it sets in these early years, but the newly confirmed galaxy, MoM-z14, holds intriguing clues to the Universe’s historical timeline and just how different a place the early Universe was than astronomers expected.
“With Webb, we are able to see farther than humans ever have before, and it looks nothing like what we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting,” said Rohan Naidu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, lead author of a paper on galaxy MoM-z14 published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.