The galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, which was discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope last year, is so far away that its light took 13.4 billion years to reach Earth. Paris: Oxygen has been detected in the most distant galaxy ever discovered, surprised astronomers said Thursday, offering further evidence that stars in the early universe matured far quicker than had been thought possible. The galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0, which was discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope last year, is so far away that its light took 13.4 billion years to reach Earth. This means the galaxy can also reveal what the universe was like in its infancy when it was just 300 million years old -- two per cent of its current age. Since coming online in 2022, the powerful Webb telescope has discovered that galaxies in the young universe were much brighter, more advanced and more numerous than scientists had expected. These discoveries have been so startling they have raised doubts about whether something important...
2 The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is one of the Milky Way’s closest neighbors. It’s a small, irregular galaxy that orbits the Milky Way and is an easy naked-eye object from the Southern Hemisphere. As one of the only galaxies outside our own where telescopes can resolve individual stars and small-scale structures, astronomers love to examine the LMC to compare and contrast it with the Milky Way. While large galaxies generally host central supermassive black holes (SMBH), dwarf galaxies like the LMC are more mixed. Astronomers have speculated about them contain a black hole, but the data has been inconclusive. Now, data from the Gaia space telescope, which tracked more than a billion stars to measure their movements and positions, has pointed to a surprising addition to this object that sits right in our cosmic backyard: It appears to have a central black hole weighing 600,000 times as much as the Sun. The research, led by Jesse Jiwon Han of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for As...