Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2025

MAY-JUNE 2025 European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner. This record- breaking detection is making as- tronomers rethink how quickly galaxies formed in the early Uni- verse. Discovered last year, JADES- GS-z14-0 is the most distant con- firmed galaxy ever found: it is so far away, its light took 13.4 billion years to reach us, meaning we see it as it was when the Universe was less than 300 million years old, about 2% of its present age. The new oxy- gen detection with ALMA, a tele- scope array in Chile’s Atacama Desert, suggests the galaxy is much Oxygen discovered in most distant known galaxy T wo different teams of as- tronomers have detected oxy- gen in the most distant known galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0. The discov- ery, reported in two separate stud- ies, was made possible thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submil- limeter Array (ALMA), in which the by ESO − Bárbara Ferreira