Astronomers have used superior devices to calculate a extra correct age of Maisie’s galaxy, found by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in June 2022. Though the star system isn’t fairly as previous as initially estimated, it’s nonetheless one of many oldest recorded, from 390 million years after the Large Bang — making it about 13.4 billion years previous. That’s a mere 70 million years youthful than JADES-GS-z13-0, the (present) oldest-known system.
A crew led by the College of Texas at Austin astronomer Steven Finkelstein discovered the system final summer time. (The identify “Maisie’s galaxy” is an ode to his daughter as a result of they noticed it on her birthday.) The group initially estimated that it was solely 290 million years after the Large Bang, however analyzing the galaxy with extra superior gear revealed it’s about 100 million years older than that. “The thrilling factor about Maisie’s galaxy is that it was one of many first distant galaxies recognized by JWST, and of that set, it’s the primary to truly be spectroscopically confirmed,” mentioned Finkelstein.
The spectroscopic affirmation got here courtesy of the JWST’s Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) carried out by the Cosmic Evolution Early Launch Science Survey (CEERS). The NIRSpec “splits an object’s mild into many various slender frequencies to extra precisely establish its chemical make-up, warmth output, intrinsic brightness and relative movement.” Redshift — the motion of sunshine in the direction of longer (redder) wavelengths to point movement away from the observer — held the important thing to extra correct relationship than the unique photometry-based estimate. The superior instruments assigned a redshift of z=11.4 to Maisie’s galaxy, serving to the researchers choose the revised estimate of 390 million years after the Large Bang.
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The astronomers additionally examined CEERS-93316, a galaxy initially estimated at 235 million years pre-Large Bang — which might have made it astonishingly previous. After learning this method, it revealed a redshift of z=4.9, which locations it at a mere one billion years after the Large Bang. The primary defective estimate about CEERS-93316 was comprehensible: The galaxy emitted an uncommon quantity of sunshine in slender frequency bands related to oxygen and hydrogen, making it seem bluer than it was.
Finkelstein chalks up the miss to unhealthy luck. “This was a sort of bizarre case,” he mentioned. “Of the numerous tens of excessive redshift candidates which have been noticed spectroscopically, that is the one occasion of the true redshift being a lot lower than our preliminary guess.” Finkelstein added, “It might have been actually difficult to elucidate how the universe may create such a large galaxy so quickly. So, I believe this was in all probability at all times the more than likely consequence, as a result of it was so excessive, so shiny, at such an obvious excessive redshift.”
The CEERS crew is now evaluating about 10 extra techniques that may very well be older than Maisie’s galaxy.
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