The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched with the aim of peering back to the beginning of time and capturing images of the earliest stars in space. In its latest exciting discovery, the JWST has identified one of the oldest galaxies in the universe, which has been named Maisie’s galaxy after the astronomer’s daughter who first observed it on her birthday. This galaxy, formed just 390 million years after the Big Bang, is one of the four earliest confirmed galaxies ever seen, with scientists currently evaluating about 10 others that may even be from an earlier era.
Maisie’s galaxy is significant because it is one of the first distant galaxies identified by the JWST and the first to be spectroscopically confirmed. The research, led by the University of Texas at Austin, was headed by Steven Finkelstein. The JWST is equipped with various instruments such as NIRCam, NIRSpec, MIRI, and FGS/NIRISS, which allow astronomers to observe and study celestial objects with great accuracy.
Determining the age of a galaxy is a complex process involving measuring the galaxy’s redshift, which indicates how its color has shifted due to its motion away from Earth. A higher redshift suggests an older object, as we live in an expanding universe. To estimate the age of Maisie’s galaxy, Finkelstein and his team initially relied on photometry, which provided a rough estimation. However, for a more accurate estimate, they used JWST’s spectroscopic instrument, NIRSpec. This instrument splits an object’s light into narrow frequencies to identify its chemical composition, heat output, brightness, and motion. Based on this analysis, Maisie’s galaxy has a redshift of z=11.4.
The researchers also studied another galaxy called CEERS-93316, initially estimated to have formed 250 million years after the Big Bang but discovered to have a more modest redshift of z=4.9, indicating it actually formed about one billion years after the universe was created. This discrepancy occurred because the galaxy emitted light in specific frequency bands associated with oxygen and hydrogen, causing it to appear bluer than it actually was. This apparent blueness mimicked the expected signature of very early galaxies. However, it was a unique case, as most high redshift candidates observed spectroscopically align with their initial estimates.
Maisie’s galaxy stood out not only due to its unusual blue appearance but also its brightness, which challenged current models predicting the formation of such massive galaxies so early in the universe. JWST, costing $10 billion, was launched from Europe’s Spaceport in December 2021, with the goal of peering deeper into the universe’s past. The discovery of Maisie’s galaxy has been published in the journal Nature.
The James Webb Telescope is often referred to as a “time machine” because of its ability to unveil the secrets of the universe. With its advanced technology, it can look back at the birth of the first galaxies over 13.5 billion years ago and observe various celestial bodies, including stars, exoplanets, and even our solar system’s moons and planets. As the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Telescope operates at a temperature of approximately minus 387 Fahrenheit and is considered the world’s most powerful orbital space telescope. NASA views it as a complement to the Hubble rather than a replacement. The Hubble telescope, launched in 1990, remains in low Earth orbit, circling the planet at about 17,000mph.
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