Galaxies · Space Codex
MoM-z14 and JADES-GS-z14-0
Webb has confirmed galaxies shining just 280–290 million years after the Big Bang.
The most distant galaxies confirmed
At a glance
Key points
MoM-z14, at redshift 14.44, holds the record as of October 2026.
- Light from 280 million years after the Big Bang
- Redshift 14.44
- Early galaxies are brighter than predicted
Why redshift matters
Light from these galaxies has been stretched by cosmic expansion by a factor of more than 15, moving ultraviolet starlight into Webb's infrared range. Only a spectrum, not a colour photograph, can confirm such a distance.
A debunked contender
A 2025 candidate nicknamed 'Capotauro', proposed at redshift around 32, was shown in 2026 to be a cold brown dwarf inside our own galaxy.
How MoM-z14 was found
The galaxy turned up in the COSMOS field during Webb's 'Mirage or Miracle' (MoM) survey, which covers about 350 square arcminutes and is led by Rohan Naidu of MIT with Pascal Oesch of the University of Geneva. NIRSpec spectra confirmed its redshift in 2025, and NASA announced the peer-reviewed result in January 2026. Its light has been travelling for about 13.5 billion of the universe's roughly 13.8 billion years.
Chemistry that arrived early
MoM-z14's spectrum shows strong nitrogen, far more relative to carbon than in the Sun, a pattern otherwise seen in some of the Milky Way's oldest stars and in certain globular clusters. Ordinary generations of stars would not have had time to make so much, so the team suggests very massive stars in the dense early universe were responsible. In 2025 two teams using ALMA also detected oxygen in JADES-GS-z14-0, a sign that the first galaxies enriched themselves with heavy elements faster than expected.
Clearing the fog
The young universe was filled with neutral hydrogen that absorbed ultraviolet light. MoM-z14's spectrum shows little sign of that absorption, tentative evidence that it had already begun ionising the gas around it, earlier than most models of this era allow. NASA expects its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to enlarge the sample of such bright early galaxies into the thousands.
What we still don't know
How galaxies grew so bright so soon, and when the very first stars switched on.
Missions
- 2021–
Infrared observatory at Sun–Earth L2, about 1.5 million km from Earth.
Related entries
- James Webb Space TelescopeInfrared observatory at L2
- Cosmic timeline13.8 billion years in one view
- Cosmic microwave backgroundThe oldest light in the universe
Sources
- ESO: eso2507 (Mar 2025): ALMA detects oxygen in JADES-GS-z14-0 (opens in a new tab)
- NASA Science: Webb pushes boundaries of the observable universe (opens in a new tab)
- Naidu et al. 2025 (arXiv) (opens in a new tab)
- Carniani et al. 2024 (arXiv) (opens in a new tab)
Last reviewed against these sources. Built from public NASA, ESA and JPL data; not affiliated with or endorsed by any agency.