The newly discovered galaxy Record-Breaking This is the oldest such observation to date and poses a major challenge to current models of galaxy formation.
It’s called JADES-GS-z14-0, and it shone brightly less than 300 million years ago in the early universe. big bangA second recently discovered object, called JADES-GS-z14-1, has also been confirmed to be nearly as distant.
According to astronomers, the detection is now “Apparent“That means Cosmic Dawn might have some explaining to do.”
“In January 2024, NIRSpec observed this galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0, for nearly 10 hours, and when the spectrum was first processed, it was clear that the galaxy Redshift At 14.32, it broke the previous record for the most distant galaxy. Astronomers say Stefano Carniani of the École Normale Supérieure in Italy and Kevin Heinlein of the University of Arizona.
“The images show that the source is more than 1,600 light-years in diameter, proving that the light we are seeing comes mainly from young stars, and not from nearby emission of growing supermassive stars. Black Hole.
“This much starlight means the galaxy has a mass hundreds of millions of times that of our Sun. This raises the question: how could nature have created such a bright, massive and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?”
Three papers have been written on this topic, one of which is newly published. Nature.
The other two, on arXiv, have not yet been peer-reviewed, but all three reach the same conclusion: JADES-GS-z14-0 does exist, and it’s a shining data point that points a new avenue toward understanding how the universe first formed.
Until relatively recently, we had very little concrete knowledge about the period known as the cosmic dawn, the first billion years or so after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. This is because the early universe was filled with a fog of neutral hydrogen that scattered light, preventing it from spreading out.
This fog did not last long, as it was ionized and cleared away by ultraviolet light emitted by objects in the early universe, making the universe transparent by the end of the cosmic dawn.
But by that time, there were lots of stars and galaxies floating around, and if you want to understand how it all formed, you’ll need to peer through the mist.
this is J.W.S.T.With its powerful infrared eyes, this camera was designed to do just that: infrared light can pass through dense media where other light cannot, and its long wavelengths allow it to pass through with minimal scattering.
JWST is being carried out Advanced deep space exploration (JADES) looked for objects from the first 650 million years after the Big Bang and got some very interesting results.
One thing we’ve found time and time again is A large object appeared much sooner than expected.This was pretty shocking, because we’ve been operating under the assumption of things like supermassive things. Black Hole And galaxies take a long time to form, much longer than our observational timeframe.
But JADES-GS-z14-0 is awesome: it’s very big, very bright, and totally different from how astronomers predicted galaxies would look in the early universe.
First, its size tells us that most of its light comes from stars, rather than the glow of light emanating from the space around an ever-growing supermassive black hole.
Analysis of the light revealed unexpectedly large amounts of dust and oxygen at such an early stage — heavy elements that would have to be created in the star’s interior before it explodes — and these signatures suggest that several generations of massive stars had already been born and died by 300 million years after the Big Bang.
While this is not impossible, given that the most massive stars today only live for a few million years, it is still quite different from what astronomers had expected to find.
Overall, this galaxy suggests we need to rethink the early universe, and shows that the large number of light sources seen there cannot be fully explained by growing black holes alone: somehow, large, luminous, well-formed galaxies can come together early in the cosmic dawn.
“JADES-GS-z14-0 now serves as the prototype for this phenomenon.” Carniani says:“It’s amazing that the universe could form such a galaxy in just 300 million years.”
The discovery paper led by Carniani states: NatureOther papers studying the properties of galaxy light can be found on arXiv. here and here.
An earlier version of this article was published in May 2024.
