Ammon News - The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted the most distant galaxy observed to date — breaking its own record yet again.

The galaxy, dubbed MoM-z14, is "the most distant spectroscopically confirmed source to date, extending the observational frontier to a mere 280 million years after the Big Bang," researchers wrote in a new study that appeared May 23 on the preprint server arXiv.

In other words, the galaxy emitted light just 280 million years after the birth of the universe; after its long journey across the cosmos, that light is only now reaching Earth and JWST's infrared sensors.

"It's pretty exciting," Charlotte Mason, an astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen who wasn't involved in the study, told New Scientist. "It confirms that there really are these very bright galaxies in the universe."

Since beginning operation in 2022, JWST has spotted more bright, ancient galaxies than scientists expected, challenging previous theories about the universe's infancy. "This unexpected population has electrified the community and raised fundamental questions about galaxy formation in the first 500 [million years after the Big Bang]," the authors wrote. Live Science