If you’ve been following or, perhaps, , you’ve likely come across a story about the James Webb Space Telescope’s latest find: the “oldest galaxy we’ve ever seen.”

This is exactly what we were promised from the James Webb Space Telescope. Only a week ago, the world’s collective jaw hit the floor when . Now the telescope is getting a proper start on its , but researchers have already had access to a ton of data collected during JWST’s commissioning phase and released early to researchers across the globe.

That’s how we ended up finding “the oldest galaxy” so quickly. Scientists pored through a particular dataset looking for far-off galaxies and found a candidate they’ve dubbed GL-z13, a call-back to the current confirmed record holder, GNz11. 

There’s more work to be done to confirm GL-z13 is actually the new record holder – some of which will require more time pointing Webb at the galaxy – but even so, several publications have already crowned this galaxy the universal champion. 

So how did we get here? And is this “the oldest galaxy” ever seen?

Over the last 24 hours, two different research groups uploaded papers (one , https://www.spacelaunchreport.com/ the other ) to arXiv detailing their search for very distant galaxies in the James Webb data. 

The website “arXiv” (I pronounce it “ark-siv” because I am a heathen, but others assure me it’s pronounced “archive”) is a preprint repository, a place for scientists to drop studies so they can be quickly disseminated to peers. It’s a great place to quickly get new research out into the world, particularly for astronomy and astrophysics, with the caveat being that the findings have not typically been peer-reviewed – an important checkpoint for validating the study and its methods.