大象传媒

Check out the first image of the most distant galaxy ever

galaxy spotted by James Webb telescopeImage source, NASA/ESA/CSA/STSCI/BRANT ROBERTSON ET AL

The James Webb telescope is the gift that keeps on giving - this time, it's beaten its own record for capturing the most distant and earliest galaxy ever observed.

It's called JADES-GS-z14-0, and the telescope caught it 290 million years after the Big Bang - which is thought to be the moment the universe began, expanding over time.

That may sound like a lot, but if the Universe is 13.8 billion years old, it means we're observing the galaxy in the past, when the cosmos was only 2% of its current age.

We see these very distance objects in the past, because of the amount of time it takes light to reach us.

It's not just really far away, but it's also huge.

Webb measures the galaxy to be more than 1,600 light years across.

Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,

The James Webb telescope eventually cost a whopping $10bn to build - that's around 拢7.5bn!

But there may be even earlier galaxies that the James Webb telescope is able to spot.

Brant Robertson, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California-Santa Cruz and a scientist on this project, said: 鈥淲e could have detected this galaxy even if it were 10 times fainter, which means that we could see other examples earlier in the Universe - probably into the first 200 million years.

鈥淭he early Universe has so much more to offer."

What is a galaxy?

Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,

This is a picture of part of our galaxy, the Mily Way

Galaxies are massive collection of gas, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems.

Our solar system is in a galaxy called the Milky Way.

Other galaxies in space are really far away.

How can the James Webb telescope see back in time?

Image source, Science Photo Library
Image caption,

Webb has a big mirror that's 6.5m across the middle

It may seem a bit strange to say these photos were taken of something hundreds of millions of years old.

We can only see things if they give off light, or are lit up.

But light takes time to travel to our eye - for example, light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach us, so when we see the Sun, we see it as it was eight minutes ago.

Things further away than that are measured in light years.

A light year is a measure of distance, not time. One light year is the distance travelled by light in one year.

Because JADES-GS-z14-0 is so far away, we are seeing it as it was billions of years ago, closer to when the universe itself was created.