James' World 2

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Kevin Hainline can time travel from his desk. Well, he can’t physically launch himself back in time. But as a user of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the University of Arizona astronomer regularly observes galaxies from billions of years ago—because it takes that long for their emitted light to reach us from across the cosmos. And recently, he tracked one further back into the universe’s history than ever before.

The record-breaking galaxy, named JADES-GS-z14-0, appears to us as it existed 290 million years after the big bang, when the universe was a mere 2 percent of its present 13.8-billion-year age. This places it well within a mysterious epoch called the cosmic dawn—when the universe’s first stars began to shine and galaxies coalesced. The former record holder, a galaxy named JADES-GS-z13-0 that was reported in 2022 by Hainline and his colleagues on the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) research team, was observed about 325 million years following the big bang. Hainline acknowledges this age difference may seem unremarkable; cosmically speaking, not a lot usually happens in just 35 million years. But JADES-GS-z14-0 has properties that are vastly different from its slightly older counterpart, making it an anomaly that has experts second-guessing how the universe’s first galaxies evolved. “I was skeptical that it was anything special for a number of reasons,” Hainline recalls of his initial glimpse of the galaxy. “It just seemed too big and too bright…. But in January of this year, when we confirmed that it is, in fact, the new record holder, I just laughed. I had to get up from my office chair and walk down the hallway and look at the faces of the other JADES scientists.”

The group’s initial doubts were well-founded, says Brant Robertson, an astronomer and JADES member at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is also a co-author of the preprint paper that reported the new record holder. JWST has been unveiling candidate early galaxies that seem to shatter experts’ expectations since it began operating in early 2022, but some of them were ultimately proved to be impostors—more modern galaxies much closer to us in the universe than JWST’s first glance would suggest. Unsurprisingly, Robertson says, the farthest galaxies are the hardest to accurately observe and verify; their qualities can be the most fascinating yet deserve the most skepticism.

JADES-GS-z14-0 was no exception to this rule; at first, Hainline thought it was just one half of another galaxy. With closer examination, he found that to be illusory. The other galaxy was a “foreground” object—an entirely different system billions of light-years closer to us that just happened to overlap with JADES-GS-z14-0 in our line of sight. With that relationship untangled, the candidate’s bizarre qualities became clearer: if it was an early galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0 was abnormally large and unusually shaped. “At that point, I had been looking at thousands of little smudgy galaxies,” Hainline says. “But then this one came along, and I sent it first to my colleague Jake Helton [of the University of Arizona] and said, ‘This is seriously weird.’ And after looking into it more for some time, I knew we had to get a spectrum on it.”

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