More than a year ago, in one of its first observations, the powerful James Webb Space Telescope photographed a set of galaxies, not knowing that it was getting involved. in the depths of the Universe.
But experts who analyzed those images concluded that a tiny red dot In the middle of a fan of galaxies is one more of them, but unique, since it was formed about 390 million years after the Big Bang explosion.
Thus, the small stain of photography, with 13.4 billion years behind you, it is about one of the first galaxies in the Universe, the oldest ever observed by mankind. And it’s 70 million years younger than the oldest known star system, the JADES-GS-z13-0.
Scientists have dubbed it as Maisie Galaxy and takes its name in honor of the daughter of Steven Finkelstein, professor of astronomy at the University of Texas and principal investigator of the study in the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS).
To calculate the galaxy’s distance from Earth, the researchers looked at the red light it emitted, as redshift is urgent when the wavelength of light is stretched. When a celestial object is rapidly moving away from our planet, The light must travel a greater distance and this causes the wavelength of the light to lengthen, causing a shift to the red end of the spectrum.
“The exciting thing about Maisie’s galaxy is that it was one of the first distant galaxies identified by James Webb and, of that set, it is the first confirmed spectroscopically,” Finkelstein said.
Initially, the team of the CEERS determined that the formation of the Maisie Galaxy it was about 366 million years after the Big Bang because, to determine their age, they measured the light in the images through different frequency filters (photometry). But later the experts made an analysis with the spectroscopic instrument of the Webb, which has dated its origin in approximately 390 million years after the Big Bang.
Spectroscopic confirmation came courtesy of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) and the near-infrared spectrograph (NIRSpec) from James Webb, which “splits an object’s light into many different narrow frequencies to more accurately identify its chemical composition, heat production, intrinsic brightness, and relative motion.”
Although the new estimates place the galaxy at a chronological point closer to today and farther from the origin of the Universe, it confirms that it is one of the oldest that have been captured.
