APOD: JADES-GS-z14-0: A New Farthest Object (2024 Jun 24)

[APOD Robot]

JADES-GS-z14-0: A New Farthest Object

Explanation: What if we could see back to the beginning of the universe? We could see galaxies forming. But what did galaxies look like back then? These questions took a step forward recently with the release of the analysis of a James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) image that included the most distant object yet discovered. Most galaxies formed at about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, but some formed earlier. Pictured in the inset box is JADES-GS-z14-0, a faint smudge of a galaxy that formed only 300 million years after the universe started. In technical terms, this galaxy lies at the record redshift of z=14.32, and so existed when the universe was only one fiftieth of the its present age. Practically all of the objects in the featured photograph are galaxies.

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[Ann]

JADES-GS-z14-0 appears to be photobombed by a galaxy colleague:

Will you marry me? Don't mind my cat. Image credit: Annie Polley

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Foreground pinkish galaxy apparently partly photobombing background orange one. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, B. Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), B. Johnson (CfA), S. Tacchella (Cambridge), P. Cargile (CfA)

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JADES-GS-z14-0 (that name sure rolls off the tongue) appears to be partly hidden behind a foreground galaxy. In the nearby universe, non-interacting overlapping galaxies are rare, but they happen:

Overlapping spiral galaxies SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461 are not that nearby, since they are more than a billion light-years away from us. But they sure are our neighbors compared with JADES-GS-z14-0. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel

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So what did galaxies look like back in the cosmic dawn? The picture of JADES-GS-z14-0 doesn't give us much of a clue. But according to NASA, primordial galaxies often looked like pool noodles and surfboards.

NASA wrote:

While most distant galaxies look like surfboards and pool noodles, others are shaped like frisbees and volleyballs.

These are examples of distant galaxies captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in its CEERS Survey. Galaxies frequently appear flat and elongated, like pool noodles or surfboards (along the top row). Thin, circular disk-like galaxies, which resemble frisbees, are the next major grouping (shown at lower left and center). Galaxies that are shaped like spheres, or volleyballs, made up the smallest fraction of their detections (shown at lower right). All of these galaxies are estimated to have existed when the universe was only 600 million to 6 billion years old. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Steve Finkelstein (UT Austin), Micaela Bagley (UT Austin), Rebecca Larson (UT Austin)

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Ann

[alex555]

This is a truly extraordinary image.

[Karthik]

While scrolling through the zoomable image I came across these :

A small galaxy seeming to dive into a larger one!

jades4_g1.png (82.39 KiB) Viewed 15756 times

A disturbed (shell?) galaxy. Perhaps interacting with the nearly edge-on one seen behind.

jades4_g2.png (153.3 KiB) Viewed 15756 times

Edge-on but with tidail-tail like features above and below.

jades4_g8.png (86.67 KiB) Viewed 15756 times

Thanks

[Christian G.]

Telescopes as time machines is a familiar idea but we should never lose sight of how extraordinary this is! Imagine if palaeontologists could study actual pictures of dinosaurs! Or if historians could see pictures of Cleopatra, or geologists seeing pictures of the Late Heavy Bombardment! What’s more, imagine if they all saw, in the same picture, Cleopatra next to a brontosaurus against a background of comets and asteroids crashing everywhere! Such is the incredible feat of deep field images...

[Holger Nielsen]

Some parts of the name puzzle me. "JADES" is an acronym for "JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey". But what dose "GS" mean? And with a redshift of z = 14.32 why the "0" in "z14-0"? The previous record holder, JADES-GS-z13-0, has a redshift of 13.2, but also a "0" in the name.

I have searched Wikipedia, Scientific American and the JADES homepage without finding an explanation.

[Chris Peterson]

Some parts of the name puzzle me. "JADES" is an acronym for "JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey". But what dose "GS" mean? And with a redshift of z = 14.32 why the "0" in "z14-0"? The previous record holder, JADES-GS-z13-0, has a redshift of 13.2, but also a "0" in the name.

I have searched Wikipedia, Scientific American and the JADES homepage without finding an explanation.

The nomenclature description given by Vizier is: [RTJ2023] JADES-GS-z1N-0. The interpretation is that "JADES" is deprecated and "RTJ2023" is the preferred catalog name to use, "G" means "galaxy", "S" means southern sky, "z1N" is the redshift, which is always greater than 10, and the name is always terminated with "-0" for reasons not stated.

[johnnydeep]

Telescopes as time machines is a familiar idea but we should never lose sight of how extraordinary this is! Imagine if palaeontologists could study actual pictures of dinosaurs! Or if historians could see pictures of Cleopatra, or geologists seeing pictures of the Late Heavy Bombardment! What’s more, imagine if they all saw, in the same picture, Cleopatra next to a brontosaurus against a background of comets and asteroids crashing everywhere! Such is the incredible feat of deep field images...

Nicely stated.

[Ann]

Telescopes as time machines is a familiar idea but we should never lose sight of how extraordinary this is! Imagine if palaeontologists could study actual pictures of dinosaurs! Or if historians could see pictures of Cleopatra, or geologists seeing pictures of the Late Heavy Bombardment! What’s more, imagine if they all saw, in the same picture, Cleopatra next to a brontosaurus against a background of comets and asteroids crashing everywhere! Such is the incredible feat of deep field images...

That would be marvelous indeed.

The reason that we can't see Cleopatra co-existing with Brontosaurus is that we would have to actually observe multiple images of Earth from different eras (possibly partly superimposed on one another) in order to see such a miraculous scenario.

We don't see the Earth like this. Image: The World We Live In (1955 HC) LIFE Geology Planet Earth Fold-Outs Vintage | eBay

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Ann

[johnnydeep]

Telescopes as time machines is a familiar idea but we should never lose sight of how extraordinary this is! Imagine if palaeontologists could study actual pictures of dinosaurs! Or if historians could see pictures of Cleopatra, or geologists seeing pictures of the Late Heavy Bombardment! What’s more, imagine if they all saw, in the same picture, Cleopatra next to a brontosaurus against a background of comets and asteroids crashing everywhere! Such is the incredible feat of deep field images...

That would be marvelous indeed.

The reason that we can't see Cleopatra co-existing with Brontosaurus is that we would have to actually observe multiple images of Earth from different eras (possibly partly superimposed on one another) in order to see such a miraculous scenario.

We don't see the Earth like this. Image: The World We Live In (1955 HC) LIFE Geology Planet Earth Fold-Outs Vintage | eBay

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Ann

True. But if the observations (from a far away galaxy in the far future) were subject to gravitational lensing that resulted in multiple images whose photons travelled fortuitously different length paths...

[S1cler]

Will you marry me? Don't mind my cat. Image credit: Annie Polley

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Foreground pinkish galaxy apparently partly photobombing background orange one. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, B. Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), B. Johnson (CfA), S. Tacchella (Cambridge), P. Cargile (CfA)

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We will see about that.

[zendae]

Perusing around today's APOD is something.
Does anyone know what this is? I assumed a star rather than a galaxy, but are the blue areas anything other than light tricks from Webb's camera?

[johnnydeep]

0.jpg

Perusing around today's APOD is something.
Does anyone know what this is? I assumed a star rather than a galaxy, but are the blue areas anything other than light tricks from Webb's camera?

I'd guess a star, but in extremely narrow field images such as this, there usually aren't any stars from what I've seen (Chris will prove me wrong no doubt). Yet, I count over half a dozen objects similar to the one in your extreme close-up. Here are three of them:

[Chris Peterson]

0.jpg

Perusing around today's APOD is something.
Does anyone know what this is? I assumed a star rather than a galaxy, but are the blue areas anything other than light tricks from Webb's camera?

A bright (by JWST standards) star, almost certainly. And all the structure around it looks to be diffraction artifacts (and the 6-fold symmetry is very strong evidence of this with JWST).