Record-Breaking Galactic Discovery: Webb Space Telescope’s Glimpse of Cosmic Dawn

NASA’s James Webb Telescope discovers a distant galaxy at redshift 14.32, suggesting unexpectedly rapid galaxy formation just 290 million years after the Big Bang.

Over the past two years, scientists have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (also called Webb or JWST) to explore what astronomers refer to as Cosmic Dawn – the period in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang where the first galaxies were born. These galaxies provide vital insight into the ways in which the gas, stars, and black holes were changing when the universe was very young.

In October 2023 and January 2024, an international team of astronomers used Webb to observe galaxies as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program. Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph), they obtained a spectrum of a record-breaking galaxy observed only two hundred and ninety million years after the Big Bang. This corresponds to a redshift of about 14, which is a measure of how much a galaxy’s light is stretched by the expansion of the universe.