Astronomers ‘Surprised’ By Find in Most Distant Known Galaxy [Video]

Scientists have detected oxygen in the most distant galaxy ever found, suggesting that early galaxies formed more rapidly than previously thought.

The record-breaking discovery, reported by two teams of astronomers in two separate studies, was made via the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

This series of telescopes in Chile’s Atacama Desert is operated by an international partnership which includes the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

JADES-GS-z14-0—discovered last year via the James Webb Space Telescope, a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency—is the most distant known galaxy.

Its light takes a whopping 13.4 billion years to reach us, meaning that we see it at a time when the the universe when it was less than 300 million years old—just some two percent of its present age.

Gergö Popping, an ESO astronomer at the European ALMA Regional Centre who was not involved in the studies, said …