ancient galaxy Archives

May 30, 2024May 30, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Webb Finds the Farthest Galaxy Ever Seen (So Far)

There are some things that never cease to amaze me and the discovery of distant objects is one of them. The James Webb Space Telescope has just found the most distant galaxy ever observed! It has the catchy title JADES-GS-z14-0 and it has a redshift of 14.32. This means its light left when the Universe was only 290 million years old! That means the light left the source LOOOONG before even our Milky Way was here! How amazing is that!

April 30, 2024April 30, 2024 by Evan Gough

Astronomers Think They’ve Found Examples of the First Stars in the Universe

An artist's illustration of some of the Universe's first stars. Called Population 3 stars, they formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Image Credit: By NASA/WMAP Science Team - https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/fuse_fossil_galaxies.html (image link), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1582286

When the first stars in the Universe formed, the only material available was primordial hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang. Astronomers call these original stars Population Three stars, and they were extremely massive, luminous, and hot stars. They’re gone now, and in fact, their existence is hypothetical.

But if they did exist, they should’ve left their fingerprints on nearby gas, and astrophysicists are looking for it.