Astronomers Just Found Oxygen in a Galaxy Born Only 300 Million Years After the Big Bang

James Webb Space Telescope reveals unexpected complex chemistry in primordial galaxy

Scientists have detected oxygen in the most distant known galaxy. Astronomers from two separate research teams made the observations, which were published in the journals Astronomy & Astrophysics and The Astrophysical Journal this month.

The new findings challenge our understanding of cosmic history—the detection of oxygen points to the possibility that galaxies formed much more quickly after the Big Bang than astronomers thought.

“It is like finding an adolescent where you would only expect babies,” Sander Schouws, the first author of the paper in The Astrophysical Journal and an astrophysicist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, says in a statement. “The results show the galaxy has formed very rapidly and is also maturing rapidly, adding to a growing body of evidence that the formation of galaxies happens much faster than was expected.”

The galaxy, named JADES-GS-z14-0, was discovered last year by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Because its light takes 13.4 billion years to reach us, astronomers are actually seeing the galaxy as it was when the cosmos was less than 300 million years old—just a short blip after the Big Bang, compared to the universe’s long lifespan. More precisely, when astronomers view JADES-GS-z14-0, they’re looking back to a time when the universe was just 2 percent of its current age.

Until now, researchers thought that era was too early for a galaxy to have heavy elements. Galaxies typically start out with young stars that contain only the lightest elements, such as hydrogen and helium. As they evolve, heavier elements like oxygen can form—and these can get dispersed across a galaxy at the end of a star’s life.

But with the help of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the researchers found that the galaxy has around ten times more heavy elements than astronomers would have predicted. The discovery represents the most distant detection of oxygen to date.

“I was astonished by the unexpected results, because they opened a new view on the first phases of galaxy evolution,” Stefano Carniani, an astronomer at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in Italy and lead author of the paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics, adds in the statement.

JADES-GS-z14-0’s brightness and large size have surprised scientists, reports Ashley Strickland for CNN. “In general, galaxies this early in the universe are very different from the famous galaxies we know from the beautiful images of Hubble and JWST,” Schouws says in an email to the outlet. “They are a lot more compact, rich in gas and messy/disordered. The conditions are more extreme, because a lot of stars are forming rapidly in a small volume.”

While more research is needed to understand how JADES-GS-z14-0 formed heavy elements, the finding points to the ever-growing potential of space observation to reveal insights on the early universe.

“I was really surprised by this clear detection of oxygen in JADES-GS-z14-0,” adds Gergö Popping, a European Southern Observatory astronomer who was not involved in either study, in the statement. “It suggests galaxies can form more rapidly after the Big Bang than had previously been thought. This result showcases the important role ALMA plays in unraveling the conditions under which the first galaxies in our universe formed.”