Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
JADES-GS-z14-0 is the most distant confirmed galaxy ever found. New observations from 2 different teams of astronomers shows that the galaxy has oxygen, making scientists rethink (again!) how galaxies formed in the early universe.
The ancient galaxy was first discovered last year by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Its light took more than 13.4 billion years to reach our solar system – so we are seeing JADES-GS-z14-0 as it was when the universe was 290 million years old, or about 2% of the universe’s lifetime.
JADES-GS-z14-0 already had astronomers and cosmologists scratching their heads. It is a very large, bright galaxy, prompting questions about how such sizable structures could have formed just a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Now papers published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and the Astrophysical Journal suggest astrophysicists need to update their theories on how galaxies evolve.
The studies show traces of oxygen in JADES-GS-z14-0 based on data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. This makes the galaxy more chemically mature than astrophysicists would expect at this time in the universe’s life.
When the universe first formed, only the lightest elements – hydrogen, helium and lithium – formed from the bonding of protons and neutrons into an atomic nucleus and the capture of electrons.
Heavier elements like oxygen would only have formed after the nuclear fusion in the cores of stars which then died in supernova explosions.
Finding oxygen in a galaxy less than 300 million years after the birth of the universe suggests these processes were well underway much earlier than cosmologists predicted.
“It is like finding an adolescent where you would only expect babies,” says first author of the Astrophysical Journal paper Sander Schouws, a PhD candidate at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “The results show the galaxy has formed very rapidly and is also maturing rapidly, adding to a growing body of evidence that the formation of galaxies happens much faster than was expected.”
Lead author on the Astronomy & Astrophysics paper, Stefano Carniani of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy, is “astonished” by the unexpected results because they opened a new view on the first phases of galaxy evolution.
“The evidence that a galaxy is already mature in the infant universe raises questions about when and how galaxies formed.”
