MoM-z14 existed just 280 million years after the Big Bang, according a team of astronomers led by Dr. Rohan Naidu from the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT.
This Webb image shows the galaxy MoM-z14 as it appeared in the distant past, only 280 million years after the Big Bang. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / Rohan Naidu, MIT / Joseph DePasquale, STScI.
“With Webb, we are able to see farther than humans ever have before, and it looks nothing like what we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting,” Dr. Naidu said.
Using Webb’s NIRSpec instrument, Dr. Naidu and colleagues confirmed that MoM-z14 has a cosmological redshift of 14.44, meaning that its light has been traveling through space, being stretched and ‘shifted’ to longer, redder wavelengths, for about 13.5 of the Universe’s estimated 13.8 billion years of existence.
“We can estimate the distance of galaxies from images, but it’s really important to follow up and confirm with more detailed spectroscopy so that we know exactly what we are seeing, and when,” said Dr. Pascal Oesch, an astronomer at the University of Geneva.
MoM-z14 is one of a growing group of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early Universe — 100 times more than theoretical studies predicted before the launch of Webb.
“There is a growing chasm between theory and observation related to the early Universe, which presents compelling questions to be explored going forward,” said Dr. Jacob Shen, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.
One place researchers and theorists can look for answers is the oldest population of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
A small percentage of these stars have shown high amounts of nitrogen, which is also showing up in some of Webb’s observations of early galaxies, including MoM-z14.
“We can take a page from archeology and look at these ancient stars in our own Galaxy like fossils from the early Universe, except in astronomy we are lucky enough to have Webb seeing so far that we also have direct information about galaxies during that time. It turns out we are seeing some of the same features, like this unusual nitrogen enrichment,” Dr. Naidu said.
With MoM-z14 existing only 280 million years after the Big Bang, there was not enough time for generations of stars to produce such high amounts of nitrogen in the way that astronomers would expect.
One theory the researchers note is that the dense environment of the early Universe resulted in supermassive stars capable of producing more nitrogen than any stars observed in the local Universe.
MoM-z14 also shows signs of clearing out the thick, primordial hydrogen fog of the early Universe in the space around itself.
One of the reasons Webb was originally built was to define the timeline for this clearing period of cosmic history, which astronomers call reionization.
This is when early stars produced light of high enough energy to break through the dense hydrogen gas of the early Universe and begin traveling through space, eventually making its way to Webb, and us.
MoM-z14 provides another clue for mapping out the timeline of reionization, work that was not possible until Webb lifted the veil on this era of the Universe.
“To figure out what is going on in the early Universe, we really need more information — more detailed observations with Webb, and more galaxies to see where the common features are, which NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be able to provide,” said Yijia Li, a graduate student at the Pennsylvania State University.
“It’s an incredibly exciting time, with Webb revealing the early Universe like never before and showing us how much there still is to discover.”
The discovery of MoM-z14 is described in a paper to be published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
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Rohan P. Naidu et al. 2026. A Cosmic Miracle: A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at zspec=14.44 Confirmed with JWST. Open Journal of Astrophysics, in press; arXiv: 2505.11263
