A Cosmic Miracle?

A while ago (last May, in fact) I posted an article about a galaxy with an apparent spectroscopic redshift of 14.44. The paper to which that post related had been submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics and I haven’t mentioned that paper again until now as the paper was then, so to speak, sub judice. Well, as of today, the paper is now published and will feature in tomorrow’s traditional Saturday roundup of publications at the journal.

This paper was in fact accepted for publication before Christmas, but it took until this morning for the final accepted article to reach the arXiv. Rather awkwardly, the Space Telescope Science Institute issued a press release about this paper on 28th January 2026 stating that the paper was published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics, when that statement was not accurate. As Editor-in Chief of the Open Journal of Astrophysics, I was subsequently contacted by a number of journalists asking where they could find the paper on the OJAp platform. Since it hadn’t been published then I had to say they couldn’t, so a number of pieces (including, for example, this one in Scientific American) have appeared based on the STSCi press release without links to the final version of the paper. It would have been far better, in my opinion, to have delayed the press release until the paper was actually published. It’s better to wait until the ball is in the back of the net before you start celebrating!

Anyway, thanks to me getting up at 6am today, it’s now published so there’s no real harm done.

The fediscience announcement is here:

https://fediscience.org/@OJ_Astro/115982837486159819

For reference, here is the key plot showing the spectrum from which the galaxy’s redshift is determined. It is rather noisy, but the Lyman break seems convincing and there are some emission lines that offer corroborative evidence:

#arXiv250511263v2 #Cosmology #galaxyFormation #highRedshiftGalaxy #LymanBreak #z1444

A galaxy at redshift z=14.44?

This morning’s arXiv mailing presented me with a distraction from examination marking in the form of a paper by Naidu et al. with this abstract:

This paper has been submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics. In the relatively recent past, papers like this about record-breaking galaxies would normally be submitted to Nature so perhaps we’re at last starting to see a change of culture?

I usually feel a bit conflicted in situations when a paper has been submitted for editorial review there. In this case I am posting it here for two reasons: one is that I am not the Editor responsible for this paper; the other is that the arXiv submission specifically says

Submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Comments greatly appreciated and warmly welcomed!

In order to generate flagging it here to encourage people to comment, either through the box below or by contacting the authors.

For reference, here is the key plot showing the spectrum from which the redshift is determined. It is rather noisy, but the Lyman break seems reasonably convincing and there are some emission lines that appear to offer corroborative evidence:

You might want to read this article (another OJAp paper) which contains this plot showing how galaxies at redshift z>10 challenge the standard model:

Please read the paper and comment if you wish!

#arXiv250511263 #Cosmology #galaxyFormation #highRedshiftGalaxy #LymanBreak #z1444