'Previously unimaginable': James Webb telescope breaks own record again, discovering farthest known galaxy in the universe

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 accepted in the Open Journal of Astrophysics, according to NASA. 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 accepted into the Open Journal of Astrophysics in January, 2026.

In other words, the galaxy emitted light just 280 million years after the birth of the universe; after its long journey across the cosmos, that light is only now reaching Earth and JWST's infrared sensors.

"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," lead study author Rohan Naidu, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a Jan. 28 statement from NASA.

Searching for cosmic dawn

Since beginning operation in 2022, JWST has spotted more bright, ancient galaxies than scientists expected, challenging previous theories about the universe's infancy. "This unexpected population has electrified the community and raised fundamental questions about galaxy formation in the first 500 [million years after the Big Bang]," the authors wrote in the study.

As more examples trickle in, scientists are working to confirm whether these luminous objects really are ancient galaxies. Naidu and colleagues combed through existing JWST images for potential early galaxies to check. After identifying MoM-z14 as a possible target, they turned the telescope toward the peculiar object in April 2025.

One way scientists can measure an astronomical object's age is by measuring its redshift. As the universe expands, it stretches the light emitted by distant objects to longer, "redder" wavelengths. The farther and longer the light has traveled, the larger its redshift.

In the new study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team confirmed MoM-z14's redshift as 14.44 — larger than that of the previous record holder for farthest observed galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0, at 14.18.

MoM-z14 is fairly compact for the amount of light it emits. It's about 240 light-years across, some 400 times smaller than our own galaxy. And it contains about as much mass as the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way.

The researchers observed MoM-z14 during a burst of rapid star formation. It's also rich in nitrogen relative to carbon, much like globular clusters observed in the Milky Way.

These ancient, tightly-bound groups of thousands to millions of stars are thought to have formed in the first few billion years of the universe, making them the oldest known stars in the nearby cosmos. That MoM-z14 appears similar could suggest that stars formed in comparable ways even at this very early stage in the universe's development.

Though scientists still aim to confirm more high redshift galaxies, researchers expect to find even more candidates with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an infrared telescope designed to observe a large swath of the sky, which could launch as soon as late 2026.

But JWST may break its own record again before then.

"JWST itself appears poised to drive a series of great expansions of the cosmic frontier," the authors wrote. "Previously unimaginable redshifts, approaching the era of the very first stars, no longer seem far away."