This Is a Photo of the Oldest Galaxy Ever Discovered Taken by the James Webb Space Telescope

Amaze Lab

The CEERS field is a particular area of space captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. It shows myriad distant, old galaxies, but one of them might just be the oldest.

Transcript

00:00 [Music]

00:04 This is what is known as the Sears Field, or a particular area of space captured by

00:08 the James Webb Space Telescope.

00:10 It shows myriad distant old galaxies, but this one right here might just be the oldest.

00:15 It's called Macy's Galaxy, and it doesn't look like much, just a red splotch on the

00:19 black backdrop of the vacuum of space.

00:21 But experts say that's expected.

00:23 That's because the universe is constantly expanding, meaning these distant objects are

00:27 literally getting further away, causing their light to be stretched.

00:30 This is called redshift, and causes extremely distant objects to appear as red, elongated

00:35 entities like this one.

00:36 So how old is the oldest galaxy ever discovered?

00:39 Experts say based on the photometry of the galaxy, the light we are seeing likely traveled

00:43 for some 13.4 billion years before it reached us, meaning the galaxy came into existence

00:48 just 390 million years after the Big Bang.

00:52 Another extremely old galaxy in the same field is called Sears 93316.

00:57 It was once thought to have been formed only 250 million years after the Big Bang.

01:01 However, spectroscopic follow-up revealed it was actually created around 1.2 billion

01:06 years after the universe creating event.

01:09 [music]

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