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LiveScience
LiveScience
Skyler Ware

James Webb telescope discovers closest galaxy to the Big Bang ever seen

A starry background, with a box showing a yellow smudge of an ancient galaxy.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Jan. 29, 2026. It was originally published in May, 2025, when the related study was released as a preprint. The study has now been peer-reviewed and published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Quotes from a NASA statement have also been added.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted the most distant galaxy observed to date — breaking its own record yet again.

The galaxy, dubbed MoM-z14, is "the most distant spectroscopically confirmed source to date, extending the observational frontier to a mere 280 million years after the Big Bang," researchers wrote in a new study, which appeared May 23, 2025 on the preprint server arXiv and was published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics in January, 2026.

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