Oxygen has been discovered literally at the edge of time!
Oxygen has been discovered literally at the edge of time!
It’s forcing astronomers to rewrite the early chapters of cosmic history. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists identified an ancient galaxy—JADES-GS-z14-0—that existed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, yet already contains a surprisingly rich amount of oxygen.
This is astonishing because, in the universe’s infancy, only hydrogen and helium existed. Heavier elements like oxygen form later inside stars and are dispersed during supernovae. The presence of oxygen in such a young galaxy means multiple generations of stars must have formed and exploded at breakneck speed, defying long-held theories of slow, gradual chemical evolution.
Even more baffling is the sheer abundance of heavy elements. JADES-GS-z14-0 contains ten times more oxygen than models predict for galaxies from this era. It’s also unexpectedly bright and massive, suggesting it didn’t just form early—it evolved rapidly, maturing in ways current cosmological models can’t fully explain. This discovery suggests the early universe was far more dynamic and chemically complex than scientists believed. If such galaxies were common, we may need to rethink how—and how fast—galaxies formed in the first billion years after the Big Bang. The race is now on to find more of these ancient, oxygen-rich outliers hiding in the depths of time.
Source: Schouws, S., et al. (2025). Detection of [OIII]88μm in JADES-GS-z14-0 at z=14.1793; Carniani, S., et al. (2025). The eventful life of a luminous galaxy at z = 14. arXiv preprints.
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