A Cosmic Miracle: A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at z=14.44 Confirmed with JWST

The big bang time relativity problem sometimes makes your brain hurt but this is amazing!

I’m so fascinated by the fact that we can look back through time by looking at these distant objects. I wish I went into astrophysics instead of engineering…

arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11263v2

Note: I like arXiv links anyway, but in this case something about the page was killing my browser, had to reload a few times.

We're seeing this galaxy as it was 280 million years after the Big Bang. But the universe didn't become transparent to photons until 100 million years after that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology)). So that's impossible. Who's wrong, Recombination theory or this paper?

Or have I missed something?

Does anyone know if JWST has seen stuff far enough for this effect to kick in?

[Angular Diameter Turnaround](https://xkcd.com/2622/)

I love the finding, but I really like the first sentence on their abstract: "JWST has revealed a stunning population of bright galaxies at surprisingly early epochs, z>10, where few such sources were expected."

Unless stunning has a technical meaning I'm unaware of, I like this approach of starting a technical paper with something less dry.

could someone ELI5 for this ignoramus?

It sounds like JWST found a galaxy where one wasn't expected to be for the time in which it takes light to reach where JWST is?

I assume it's important because we expected nothing and there was something?

But I am just guessing, honestly

That's the most authors I've seen on any paper. I counted 46 across 36 separate institutions.

Why did we make just an infrared telescope then? Why don't go into even lower frequencies, surely we would detect something too if we just look?

Controversial idea. Black holes are older than the Big Bang.

[dead]