The MoM-z14 Galaxy: 280 million years after The Big Bang | Webb Telescope
This image of the COSMOS Legacy Field captured by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) highlights the galaxy MoM-z14, with compass arrows and color key for reference. MoM-z14 is currently the farthest galaxy Webb has detected.
“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:
The north and east compass arrows show the orientation of the image on the sky. Note that the relationship between north and east on the sky (as seen from below) is flipped relative to direction arrows on a map of the ground (as seen from above).
This image shows near-infrared wavelengths of light that have been translated into visible-light colors. The color key shows which NIRCam filters were used. The color of each filter name is the visible-light color used to represent the infrared light that passes through that filter.
Image Description: A wide field of view showing deep space, dotted with many small galaxies and a few foreground stars that display six diffraction spikes. One galaxy is highlighted with a magnified image in a graphic pull-out box in the lower right corner. The galaxy is labeled MoM-z14 and appears as a blurry yellow blob with a small red area at its top. At the bottom left are compass arrows indicating the orientation of the image on the sky. Below the image is a color key showing which NIRCam filters were used to create the image and the visible-light color assigned to each filter.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, R. Naidu (MIT), Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)
Release Date: Jan. 28, 2026
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