James Webb Space Telescope finds most distant galaxy ever detected: 'It looks nothing like what we predicted'

An image of a starfield with a boxout to the right showing a yellow smudge with the label MoM-z14.

Galaxy MoM-z14, seen as it appeared just 280 million years after the Big Bang, allows astronomers to peer closer than ever before to the era when the first stars and galaxies formed, known as cosmic dawn. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Rohan Naidu (MIT); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the most distant galaxy yet detected, NASA announced Wednesday (Jan. 28), allowing astronomers to peer closer than ever before to the era when the first stars and galaxies formed, known as cosmic dawn.

The galaxy, named MoM-z14, offers a rare glimpse into the universe just 280 million years after the Big Bang. Its light has traveled for about 13.5 billion years to reach Earth, making it the farthest and one of the earliest known galaxies ever observed.

The discovery, based on JWST data from April 2025 and published this month in the Open Journal of Astrophysics, adds MoM-z14 to a growing list of unexpectedly luminous young galaxies that challenge existing theories about how quickly stars and galaxies formed after the universe began. According to NASA, MoM-z14 is "brighter, more compact, and more chemically enriched" than astronomers anticipated for such an early era.

Among its most surprising features are elevated levels of nitrogen, which suggest that massive stars may have formed and evolved more rapidly in the dense early universe than current models predict. The galaxy also appears to have cleared its surrounding region of primordial hydrogen gas — an unexpected finding, the researchers say, given that the early universe was filled with neutral hydrogen.

"There is a growing chasm between theory and observation related to the early universe, which presents compelling questions to be explored going forward," study co-author Xuejian (Jacob) Shen, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, said in the statement.

Before JWST's launch, theoretical models suggested that detecting bright galaxies beyond a redshift of 10, past the reach of the Hubble Space Telescope, would be extraordinarily difficult. Those models assumed early galaxies would be small, faint, and rare, leading astronomers to expect only a handful of dim sources that would require tens of hours of spectroscopic observations to confirm, the new study notes.

Instead, JWST has routinely exceeded expectations, its powerful infrared eye capturing light from tens of young galaxies that existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

"While we were hoping for some very early objects, I don't think any of us expected to break the redshift record!" study co-author Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, told Space.com in May last year, when a preprint version of the paper was released.

That the telescope continues to break its own records suggests that even more record-breaking discoveries lie ahead, astronomers say.

"It's an incredibly exciting time," study co-author Yijia Li of the Pennsylvania State University said in the NASA statement, "with Webb revealing the early universe like never before and showing us how much there still is to discover."

Sharmila Kuthunur is an independent space journalist based in Bengaluru, India. Her work has also appeared in Scientific American, Science, Astronomy and Live Science, among other publications. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Northeastern University in Boston.

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