Astronomers have detected a galaxy that is bigger than anyone previously observed
With help In the James Webb space telescope, a group of astronomers breaks records of the oldest and most distant Milky Way ever discovered.
In a preprint study, still awaiting peer review and publications for journals, astronomers described the original galaxy, calling it Mama Z14. According to the researchers’ calculations, this “cosmic miracle” originated in 280 million years after the Big Bang, beating Discovery’s discovery last year by Jades-GS-Z14-0, a galaxy created 290 million years after the origin of the universe.
To put these measurements in context, the current age of the universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years. The age of the earth is about 4.543 billion years. No one expected the James Webb space telescope to observe something so close to the Big Bang three and a half years after launch.
A brief reminder of the distance between time and space. Since light travels at a limited speed of 300,000 meters per second, and because space is expanding, observing light from very distant objects is equivalent to seeing them as they look. For example, when we say the Mom Z14 is 13.5 billion years old, it means you have to travel at the speed of light for 13.5 billion years to reach your destination. So far, no scientific instrument has been detected by older scientific instruments than this.
The James Webb space telescope has the ability to penetrate faraway space, allowing us to study certain aspects of the universe at an early stage. How does it do it? Through infrared sensor. As the universe expands, almost all galaxies we see from Earth are removed from us. So, from our perspective, their light appears to have longer wavelengths because it is stretched by this movement. We call it “redshift”: their wavelengths are red because they are longer and therefore shift towards the red end of the spectrum. The earlier an object is created, so the further away, and the longer it expands outward, the larger the redshift.
The James Webb space telescope was able to determine that the MOM Z14 was 50 times smaller than the Milky Way and also detected the presence of nitrogen and carbon in the Milky Way. This is important because although only 280 million years larger than the Big Bang, it suggests that Mama Z14 is not part of the first generation of galaxies formed, as the stars in these galaxies are composed only of hydrogen and helium, which are mainly elements that make up the early universe. The heavier elements only arrive later after the stars are produced.
Can James Webb cross that threshold and find the first generation of galaxies? Such discoveries may still go a long way to go, but we must continue to search.
This story originally appeared in wired español and has been translated into Spanish.
