Astronomers have discovered oxygen in the most distant known galaxy ever seen, named JADES-GS-z14-0.
This surprising finding is making scientists rethink how quickly galaxies formed after the Big Bang.
JADES-GS-z14-0 was found last year. It is so far away that its light took 13.4 billion years to reach Earth.
That means we are seeing the galaxy as it looked when the universe was only about 300 million years old—just 2% of its current age.
The discovery was made using a powerful telescope in Chile called ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), which can detect signals from faraway galaxies.
ALMA helped two different teams of scientists detect oxygen in this ancient galaxy.
This is surprising because researchers didn’t expect such a young galaxy to already have heavy elements like oxygen.
“It’s like finding a teenager where you’d expect to see only babies,” said Sander Schouws, the lead author of one study. His team is based in the Netherlands. “This means the galaxy formed and grew much faster than we thought possible.”
Galaxies are born full of young stars mostly made of light elements like hydrogen and helium. As stars age, they create heavier elements such as oxygen. These heavier elements usually appear later in a galaxy’s life, after several generations of stars have lived and died.
Scientists believed the early universe was too young for galaxies to have a lot of these heavy elements. But the new studies show that JADES-GS-z14-0 has about 10 times more oxygen and other heavy elements than expected.
“I was amazed by the results. They gave us a new way to think about how the first galaxies evolved,” said Stefano Carniani, lead author of the second study from Italy.
The oxygen discovery also helped scientists measure the distance to this galaxy more accurately than ever before—with only 0.005% uncertainty, which is like being accurate within just 5 centimeters over 1 kilometer.
JADES-GS-z14-0 was first spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), but ALMA confirmed its distance and gave clearer information about its chemical makeup.
“This shows how powerful JWST and ALMA are when used together,” said Rychard Bouwens, an astronomer involved in the research.
Astronomer Gergö Popping, who wasn’t part of the studies, said, “This discovery shows that galaxies may have formed much faster after the Big Bang than we ever imagined.”
