Hi, 'Mom'! James Webb telescope discovers MoM-z14 — the most distant, early galaxy ever seen
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted the most distant galaxy observed to date — breaking its own record yet again.
The galaxy, dubbed MoM-z14, is "the most distant spectroscopically confirmed source to date, extending the observational frontier to a mere 280 million years after the Big Bang," researchers wrote in a new study that appeared May 23 on the preprint server arXiv.
In other words, the galaxy emitted light just 280 million years after the birth of the universe; after its long journey across the cosmos, that light is only now reaching Earth and JWST's infrared sensors.
"It's pretty exciting," Charlotte Mason, an astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen who wasn't involved in the study, told New Scientist. "It confirms that there really are these very bright galaxies in the universe."
Since beginning operation in 2022, JWST has spotted more bright, ancient galaxies than scientists expected, challenging previous theories about the universe's infancy. "This unexpected population has electrified the community and raised fundamental questions about galaxy formation in the first 500 [million years after the Big Bang]," the authors wrote.
As more examples trickle in, scientists are working to confirm whether these luminous objects really are ancient galaxies. Study lead author Rohan Naidu, an astrophysicist at MIT, and colleagues combed through existing JWST images for potential early galaxies to check. After identifying MoM-z14 as a possible target, they turned the telescope toward the peculiar object in April 2025.
One way scientists can measure an astronomical object's age is by measuring its redshift. As the universe expands, it stretches the light emitted by distant objects to longer, "redder" wavelengths. The farther and longer the light has traveled, the larger its redshift. In the new study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team confirmed MoM-z14's redshift as 14.44 — larger than that of the previous record holder for farthest observed galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0, at 14.18.
Related: James Webb telescope sees 'birth' of 3 of the universe's earliest galaxies in world-1st observations
MoM-z14 is fairly compact for the amount of light it emits. It's about 240 light-years across, some 400 times smaller than our own galaxy. And it contains about as much mass as the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way.
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The researchers observed MoM-z14 during a burst of rapid star formation. It's also rich in nitrogen relative to carbon, much like globular clusters observed in the Milky Way. These ancient, tightly-bound groups of thousands to millions of stars are thought to have formed in the first few billion years of the universe, making them the oldest known stars in the nearby cosmos. That MoM-z14 appears similar could suggest that stars formed in comparable ways even at this very early stage in the universe's development.
Though scientists still aim to confirm more high redshift galaxies, researchers expect to find even more candidates with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an infrared telescope designed to observe a large swath of the sky, which is set to launch by May 2027.
But JWST may break its own record again before then. "JWST itself appears poised to drive a series of great expansions of the cosmic frontier," the authors wrote. "Previously unimaginable redshifts, approaching the era of the very first stars, no longer seem far away."
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