Cosmic Dawn: Webb catches most distant galaxies born soon after Big Bang

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has been studying what astronomers refer to as a "cosmic dawn" for the past two years, has caught what scientists believe to be the farthest distant known galaxies, Fox News reported.

A "cosmic dawn" is defined by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) as the first few hundred million years following the Big Bang, during which the first galaxies were born.

According to Nasa, the galaxies provide scientists with information about how gas, stars, and black holes evolved during the early stages of the universe.

In October 2023 and January 2024, a group of international astronomers observed galaxies using the Webb telescope as a part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JAMES) programme.

Two of the team's astronomers, Kevin Hainline from the University of Arizona, and Stefano Carniani from Scuola Normale Superiore, informed Nasa that Webb's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) observed the galaxy known to astronomers as JADES-GS-z14-0 for almost ten hours in January 2024.

It was only 290 million years after the big bang when the researchers captured the spectrum of what Nasa called a record-breaking galaxy during that time.

The universe's expansion is measured by how much a galaxy's light is stretched; in the instance of the most distant galaxy known, this was measured at a redshift of roughly 14.