The most distant galaxy ever discovered has been discovered by astronomers

It's a record that has already been broken multiple times in the last two years, and one that we expect will be broken again shortly. It appears to be the most distant galaxy yet discovered by astronomers using the newly operational James Webb Space Telescope 

You've already seen this twice this year if this sounds familiar. Scientists announced in April that they had observed a galaxy just 330 million years after the Big Bang. Another 300 million years after the Big Bang was found in other JWST data last month.

However, the new record-holder is mind-blowing. In the murk of the early Universe, it represents just 235 million years after the Big Bang, a cosmic blink compared to the Universe's 13.8 billion-year age. This galaxy candidate, named CEERS-93316, marks the beginning of something wonderful: Webb will allow us a glimpse into the dark and mysterious early universe.

Astrophysicist Callum Donnan of the University of Edinburgh has submitted a paper pending peer review to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The paper is available on the preprint server arXiv.

Astronomers are fascinated by the first billion years after the Big Bang. In this period, matter, antimatter, dark matter, stars, galaxies, and dust all began forming as a result of the hot, quantum soup that filled the Universe after it winked into existence.

In other words, light is a time machine that transports us from distant reaches of the Universe back in time. The early Universe, however, is more challenging: it's so far away that any light we see is very faint. 

Even the most visible objects are hard to read as a result of the expansion of the Universe, which stretched even the most energetic waves into lackluster rays closer to the infrared spectrum. As a result, it is very difficult to reconstruct the events of that time in detail. It's even more unfortunate since it's such a critical time.

In Cosmic Dawn, stars were yet to be born before the first stars appeared. The Universe was filled with an opaque cloud of hydrogen atoms nearly 250 million years after the Big Bang. All electromagnetic spectrum was not propagated until ultraviolet light from first stars and galaxies reionized neutral hydrogen.

After the Big Bang, light could once again shine unhindered due to this Epoch of Reionization. As we understand more about the Universe's early years during this foggy period, we seek to understand how the first stars formed in dawn clouds, how galaxies clustered, and how supermassive black holes could form so rapidly in the first centuries of existence. One of Webb's primary functions is to look back on that distant, misty time.

This telescope has the highest resolution of any telescope ever sent to space, capturing near-infrared and infrared light. In particular, it will be capable of detecting extremely redshifted galaxies, so that cosmologists can finally see what's happening at Cosmic Dawn, if not during Reionization itself.

It is almost certain that CEERS-93316 is a very early galaxy, according to Donnan and his colleagues. Researchers ruled out other possible explanations for the dim, red glow, and their analysis indicates star formation in the galaxy candidate may have begun 120 to 220 million years after the Big Bang.

It will be necessary to conduct further spectroscopic observations to confirm the object's identity. Hopefully, this would confirm the redshift, and the object could be studied further, in more detail, to construct a census of objects in the early Universe.