But it's worth noting that confirmation of these far off entities as bona fide galaxies will require further observations which are very likely to come during the first years of Webb's operation.Īnd yes, the Webb Space Telescope is poised to deliver even more candidates for the most distant galaxy ever observed beyond today. There's even more uncertainty about distances when you bring in the gentle disagreement between astrophysicists about how fast the universe is expanding. Caution is warranted when looking at these distant galaxies and, across the slew of new papers, astronomers are seeing different signals. "Many of the candidates in these papers aren't as convincing ," said Michael Brown, an astrophysicist at Monash University in Melbourne. However, it's still got a shot at becoming the most distant galaxy ever observed because astrophysicists need to validate what they're seeing in the JWST data. Well, its z value is about 13 (as the name might suggest), so perhaps it's Game Over for Glassy. It's also important to note GL-z13 is currently just a "candidate" that requires further investigation - the data is pretty good, according to astronomers I've spoken with - but further observations would help tick it off as the record holder. It's maybe the oldest light we've ever detected but it's probably a very young galaxy, no more than a 100 billion years into its life (an important distinction). It's not the "oldest galaxy" we've ever seen. In the rush of reporting, a few key points were missed. The story exploded across the web, with Twitter buzzing about it and mainstream outlets picking up on the record-breaking find. "JWST has found the oldest galaxy we have ever seen in the universe" one headline read. (The Atlantic gave it the cutesy name of "Glassy.") One of them was dubbed GLASSz-13 or GL-z13 for short. Lurking within the data were two galaxies - potentially the most distant galaxies humans had ever laid eyes on. Not even a week ago, two preprint papers posted to scientific article repository arXiv (pronounced "archive") detailed some of the earliest analysis of images snapped by the JWST, humanity's next-generation infrared eye on the cosmos.
It was spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope and championed as the "oldest galaxy ever seen" and it was announced.
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