Location of The MoM-z14 Galaxy—The Farthest Detected to Date | Webb Telescope
This video shows the MoM-z14 galaxy's location in the COSMOS field. The galaxy designated MoM-z14 is currently the farthest galaxy ever detected, spotted by the NASA/European Space Agency/Canadian Space Agency James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and confirmed spectroscopically with its Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument.
Through Webb, we are seeing this galaxy as it appeared in the distant past, only 280 million years after the Universe began in the big bang. Its light has traveled through space for more than 13 billion years to reach us.
Like other galaxies Webb has discovered in the early Universe, MoM-z14 is brighter, more compact, and more chemically enriched than astronomers expected to find in this early era. While it may pass out of record books quickly as the farthest galaxy, MoM-z14 will still play a role in helping astronomers and theorists reach new understanding of the earliest chapters in the Universe’s story.
“With Webb, we are able to see farther than humans ever have before, and it looks nothing like what we predicted, which is both challenging and exciting,” said Rohan Naidu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics 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 Universe that is driven by dark energy, discussion of physical distances and “years ago” becomes tricky when looking this far.
Using Webb’s NIRSpec (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 in Switzerland, co-principal investigator of the survey.
Learn about The Big Bang:
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, R. Naidu (MIT), Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)
Duration: 15 seconds
Release Date: Jan. 28, 2026
Release Date: Jan. 28, 2026
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