When astronomers look deep into the blackness of space, they are literally looking back in time as light traveling to us from the earliest parts of the universe takes billions of years to reach us. Recently they imaged the earliest galaxy ever observed, one that was formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang.
00:00When astronomers look deep into the blackness of space, they are literally looking back in time as light traveling to us from the earliest parts of the universe takes billions of years to reach us.
00:14And this is what experts say is the earliest galaxy ever observed.
00:18One that was formed just 300 million years after the big bang.
00:22It's called JADES-GS-Z14-0 and experts say it stretches some 1600 light years across.
00:29However, all of the starlight coming from this newly minted record holder is challenging what physicists believed possible.
00:35According to the researchers, this much starlight implies that the galaxy is several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the sun.
00:42This raises the question, how can nature make such a bright, massive and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?
00:49This galaxy would have formed during what is called the cosmic dawn or the first billion years after the big bang.
00:55Astronomers predicted that when the galaxy was formed there wouldn't be heavy elements and oxygen in these quantities.
01:00Yet this galaxy has them in troves.
01:02Experts say that means there were likely several generations of stars that experienced entire life cycles prior to the astronomers observing it.
01:09With one of the researchers noting, it is stunning that the universe can make such a galaxy in only 300 million years.
01:16At the same time, it is a distinction between the galaxy and the galaxy in order of this galaxy.
01:25The galaxy has been a three-pencil.
01:28The galaxy has fallen for thousands of years since the galaxy has fallen to the galaxy over a galaxy.
01:32The galaxy has fallen for a couple of years of years after the galaxy.
01:34And the galaxy has fallen for years before the galaxy.
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