By now Webb has established that it will eventually surpass virtually every benchmark it sets in these early years, but the newly confirmed galaxy, MoM-z14, holds intriguing clues to the Universe’s historical timeline and just how different a place the early Universe was than astronomers expected.

“With Webb, we are able to see galaxies farther than ever have before. We find that the early Universe looks nothing like what we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting,” said Rohan Naidu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, lead author of a paper on galaxy MoM-z14 published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.

Due to the expansion of the Universe that is driven by dark energy, discussion of physical distances and 'years ago' becomes tricky when looking this far. Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument, astronomers confirmed that MoM-z14 has a cosmological redshift [1] of 14.44, meaning that its light has been travelling through (expanding) space, being stretched and 'shifted' to longer, redder wavelengths, for about 13.5 of the Universe’s estimated 13.8 billion years of existence.

“We can estimate the distance of galaxies from images, but it’s really important to follow up and confirm with more detailed spectroscopy so that we know exactly what we are seeing, and when,” said Pascal Oesch of the University of Geneva in Switzerland, co-principal investigator of the survey.