Did the Webb Space Telescope Find the Oldest Galaxy Ever Seen? Complicated

If you are already following astronomy community on Twitter or maybe, Captain America himselfYou may have come across the story about the latest discovery of the James Webb Space Telescope: “The oldest galaxy we have ever seen.”

This is exactly as promised from the James Webb Space Telescope. Just a week ago, the collective jaws of the world hit the floor when First amazing picture revealed. Now, the telescope started off right myriad science programsbut researchers already have access to much of the data collected during the commissioning phase of JWST and released earlier to researchers around the world.

That’s how we ended up discovering the “oldest galaxy” so quickly. Scientists examine specific data sets to search for distant galaxies and find a candidate they have dubbed the GL-z13, a callback to the current confirmed record holder, the GNz11.

There’s still a lot of work to be done to make sure the GL-z13 is actually the new record holder — some of which will take more time to get Webb into the galaxy — but even so, several publications have crowned the galaxy the universal champion.

So how did we get here? And is this the “oldest galaxy” ever seen?

Over the past 24 hours, two different research groups uploaded papers (one here, the other here) to arXiv detailing their search for very distant galaxies in the James Webb data.

The “arXiv” website (I pronounce it ARK-SIV because I’m an infidel, but others assure me it’s pronounced “archive”) is a pre-print repository, a place for scientists to drop studies so they can be quickly disseminated to colleagues . It’s a great place to quickly get new research out into the world, especially for astronomy and astrophysics, with the caveat that its findings aren’t usually peer reviewed — an important checkpoint for validating research and its methods.

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I don’t want to waste time on the GL-z13, but I just want to be a little careful. In communicating the findings with such certainty, there is potential for readers to lose faith in scientists if it turns out that the GL-z13 is something else entirely. Several astronomers I spoke to believe the data is pretty convincing and the galaxy is most likely far away (looong), but until confirmation, GL-z13 cannot take on the title of “oldest galaxy.”

And for some, even the title itself is a bit misleading.

You know, GL-Z13 isn’t really the “oldest galaxy ever” — it’s from a time when the universe was only 330 million years old. That means, if confirmed, this might be youngest galaxy ever seen, according to Nick Seymour, an astrophysicist at Curtin University in Western Australia.

“At 330 million years after the Big Bang, it was no more than 100 million years old,” Seymour said. “Therefore, it really is a galactic baby at dawn.”

It’s natural to get excited about record-breaking space feats. As a science journalist, I do this almost every day. However, in reporting new findings, it is important to convey uncertainty. In the headlines, in social posts, in the way we discuss scientific progress. Uncertainty is key — and should be celebrated in science. The story of the GL-z13 is beautiful and just getting started. Astronomers must now study it further to make sure the distance is correct.

“Obviously there’s a lot of follow-up work to be done, but this is really kind of a glimpse of what happened with James Webb,” said Michael Brown, an astrophysicist at Monash University.

It wasn’t until April of this year, before Webb explored the cosmos, that astronomers announce that they may have found the farthest galaxy, HD1. The galaxy is believed to have originated from a time when the universe was about 330 million years old. Brown noted at the time that caution was needed in handing the title to HD1 because the data might point to a galaxy billions of light years closer to Earth. To ascertain the distance, as with the GL-z13, we need further observations.

Know what telescope can do that? You guessed it, JWST.

We’re blown away by the record being broken, but perhaps the most exciting thing of all is if Webb does as well as expected (and seems to work better than scientists dreamed), the title for “oldest galaxy” will change hands as much as the WWE 24/7 Hardcore Championship. We will discover new galaxies further back in time at speeds we could not have dreamed of.

If that’s the case, I hope it won’t be too long before that record falls.

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