The red blob in the background of an image of deep space is now confirmed as one of the oldest galaxies in the Universe.
This is Maisie’s Galaxy. Spectroscopic analysis confirmed that it’s a galaxy. James Webb Space TelescopeThe object was observed just 390,000,000 years after its appearance. Big Bang. It’s official: it is not as early as the scientists originally thought. The earliest known occurrence of a sandstone cliff is dated back to the early 1600s.There are confirmed galaxies throughout the Universe.
According to a US National Science Foundation team led by Pablo Arrabal Haro, NOIRLab. The results help to confirm The early UniverseThis is a fact We were surprised to find the city much more populated than expectedBut that it is necessary to take care when analysing the JWST observation.
“The most exciting thing about Maisie’s galaxy is that, of all the distant galaxies that JWST identified, this was the first one to have been spectroscopically verified.” Steven Finkelstein, astronomerUniversity of Texas at Austin who named the galaxy after his daughter on her birthday. Last year, the discovery of a galaxy took place.
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It takes some time to figure out the timeline of the galaxies that emerged in the early Universe.
Redshift is the best tool that we have at this time. The Universe is expanding rapidly, so it appears that objects outside our galaxy are receding. The faster the material is moving away from us, the farther it has to travel for light to reach us.
It causes the light to be stretched, or “redshifted”. The wavelengths of the light become longer and the intensity increases in the redder spectrum. Astronomers measure redshift by using the letter Z to describe the phenomenon.
JWST is powerful instrument which studies the Universe using infrared wavelength. Scientists are using JWST to peer deeper into the early Universe.
There is more than one method to calculate Z. Finkelstein and team First published at Maisie’s GalaxyThey based their redshift estimation on PhotometryThe brightness of the light is measured through a number of filters. The estimate was z12. They thought that the galaxy was observed about 366 million after the Big Bang.
The team then used the JWST to refine the results. spectroscopic instrument, NIRSpecThe light is split into near-infrared waves for a detailed analysis. NIRSpec’s data revealed a redshift around 390 million year after the Big Bang of z=11.4. This means the light from Maisie’s Galaxy travelled for approximately 13.4 billion years until it was detected by JWST.
Researchers also examined two other galaxies that were discovered in Cosmic evolution Early Release Science.CERS( Survey that produced Maisie’s Galaxy. One of these returned a value of redshift which was in line with its photometric estimation, namely z=11.043. The other however was very off.
CEERS-93316 was tentatively identified at 250 million years after the Big Bang – redshift z≃16.4 – but spectroscopic follow-up was needed to confirm. The spectroscopic results showed a redshift of z=4.9. Around 1.2 billion years have passed since the Big Bang.
The misidentification occurred because it had three overlapping properties that mimicked the colors expected of a galaxy spotted at z≈16 in photometric analysis.
The researchers warn that other galaxies might also fall into the “triple overlap” zone, and caution should be taken with objects which appear to have high redshifts.
All is well in the end, at least as far as CEER-93116 is concerned.
“It was really difficult to explain why the Universe created such a massive galaxies so soon,” Finkelstein says.
“I think that this was always the most probable outcome because it was so bright and extreme at such a high apparent redshift.”
The research was published in Nature.
