Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2026

29 MAY-JUNE 2026 ASTRO PUBLISHING than humans ever have before, and it looks nothing like what we pre- dicted, which is both challenging and exciting,” said Rohan Naidu of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology’s (MIT) Kavli Institute for As- trophysics and Space Research, lead author of a paper on galaxy MoM- z14 published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics . Due to the expansion of the uni- verse that is driven by dark energy, discussion of physical distances and “years ago” becomes tricky when looking this far. Using Webb’s NIR- Spec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument, astronomers confirmed that MoM-z14 has a cosmological redshift of 14.44, meaning that its light has been travelling through (expanding) 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 Pascal Oesch of the University of Geneva, co-principal investigator of the sur- vey. MoM-z14 is one of a growing group of surprisingly bright galaxies in the N ASA’s James Webb Space Tel- escope has topped itself once again, delivering on its prom- ise to push the boundaries of the observable universe closer to cosmic dawn with the confirmation of a bright galaxy that existed 280 mil- lion years after the big bang. By now Webb has established that it will eventually surpass virtually every benchmark it sets in these early years, but the newly con- firmed galaxy, MoM-z14, holds in- triguing clues to the universe’s historical timeline and just how dif- ferent a place the early universe was than astronomers expected. “With Webb, we are able to see farther N ASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows galaxy MoM-z14 as it appeared in the distant past, only 280 million years after the Universe began in the Big Bang. [NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Rohan Naidu (MIT); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)]