JAKARTA – The James Webb Space Telescope has once again demonstrated its capabilities, this time discovering the oldest or earliest known galaxy.
The galaxy is called Maisie, which dates back 390 million years after the Big Bang and was detected in June 2022. Although this star system is not as old as previously thought, it is still one of the oldest on record.
Maisie is only 70 million years younger than JADES-GS-z13-0, which is thought to be the oldest system today. The galaxy was first discovered by astronomer Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas at Austin through the Webb Telescope.
“The interesting thing about the Maisie galaxy is that it was one of the first distant galaxies identified by the Webb Telescope, and from that cluster, it was the first to be confirmed spectroscopically,” Finkelstein said in his official statement, quoted Friday, August 18.
He named the galaxy after his daughter when it was discovered on her birthday. Spectroscopic confirmation came thanks Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) Webb Telescope performed by Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS).
NIRSpec divides an object’s light into many different narrow frequencies to more accurately identify its chemical makeup, heat output, intrinsic brightness, and relative motion.
According to this new spectroscopic analysis published in the journal Nature, it places the Maisie galaxy at a redshift z=11.4. The study also looked at CEERS-93316, a galaxy originally discovered in the CEERS data and thought to have appeared 250 million years after the Big Bang.
On further analysis, the researchers later found CEERS-93316 to have a lower redshift of z=4.9, which is equivalent to about 1 billion years after the Big Bang.
It turns out that the hot gas in CEERS-93316 emits so much light in a few narrow bands of frequencies associated with oxygen and hydrogen that it makes the galaxy appear much bluer than it actually is.
“This is a strange case. Of the dozens of high redshift candidates that have been observed spectroscopically, this is the only example of a true redshift that is much smaller than our initial estimate,” says Finkelstein.
“This galaxy not only appears unnaturally blue, but is also much brighter than our current models predict for galaxies that formed early in the universe.”
For your information, CEERS researchers are currently evaluating about 10 other galaxies that may be from an even earlier era than Maisie.
Tag: telescope james webb in the galaxy
2023-08-18 23:05:00
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