Astronomers Shatter Previous Record by Discovering a Galaxy That Formed Shortly After the Big Bang
When astronomers look deep into the blackness of space, they are literally looking back in time as light traveling to us from the earliest parts of the universe takes billions of years to reach us. Recently they imaged the earliest galaxy ever observed, one that was formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang.
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00:00When astronomers look deep into the blackness of space, they are literally looking back
00:07in time, as light traveling to us from the earliest parts of the universe takes billions
00:12of years to reach us.
00:13And this is what experts say is the earliest galaxy ever observed, one that was formed
00:18just 300 million years after the Big Bang.
00:22It's called JADES-GS-Z14-0, and experts say it stretches some 1600 light years across.
00:29However, all of the starlight coming from this newly minted record holder is challenging
00:33what physicists believed possible.
00:36According to the researchers, this much starlight implies that the galaxy is several hundreds
00:40of millions of times the mass of the sun.
00:42This raises the question, how can nature make such a bright, massive, and large galaxy in
00:47less than 300 million years?
00:49This galaxy would have formed during what is called the Cosmic Dawn, or the first billion
00:53years after the Big Bang.
00:55Astronomers predicted that when the galaxy was formed, there wouldn't be heavy elements
00:58and oxygen in these quantities.
01:00Yet this galaxy has them in troves.
01:02Experts say that means there were likely several generations of stars that experienced entire
01:07life cycles prior to the astronomers observing it.
01:10With one of the researchers noting, it is stunning that the universe can make such a
01:13galaxy in only 300 million years.