Scientists using two enormous telescopes — one on Earth and the other in space — have detected oxygen in the most ancient known galaxy, a star-scape beaming light just 300 million years after the Big Bang.
The galaxy, discovered with NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope in 2024, is called JADES-GS-z14-0. In new observations involving the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, or ALMA, two separate groups of researchers not only measured its extraordinary distance with precision, but confirmed signals that oxygen was present.
The finding, along with other mounting evidence, has rocked the research community, challenging prior thinking that galaxies this long ago — when the universe was only two percent its age of 13.8 billion years — would not have had many elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Before Webb, other telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and computer simulations suggested oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen didn’t come about for perhaps another 200 to 400 million years.
The new studies, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and The Astrophysical Journal, suggest the distant galaxy has about 10 times more heavy elements than expected, forcing scientists to rethink how early galaxies could have formed and evolved so quickly.
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