A galaxy from the early Universe that has come to be known as “Maisie’s Galaxy” is actually among the earliest known. This has now been confirmed with spectroscopic analysis, which has determined that the galaxy is a little younger than first thought. The James Webb Space Telescope sees it in a state 390 million years after the Big Bang. This makes it one of the four earliest galaxies whose age has been confirmed, writes the University of Texas. In the analysis presented now, it was also found that a galaxy initially thought to be significantly older is much younger. It’s just bad luck that it didn’t exist 250 million years after the big bang, as thought, but a billion years.
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Other candidates are being reviewed
A year after the commissioning of the new space telescope, the discoveries of particularly early galaxies announced immediately thereafter, the mass of which had even puzzled science, are now becoming more concrete. Only the absolute record holders could not be confirmed so far. For example, early data on a galaxy called CEERS-93316 indicated that it existed just 250 million years after the Big Bang. However, this appearance only arose because of a peculiarity of the photometric method, which occurs precisely at a redshift of z = 4.9 (one billion years after the Big Bang). Hot gas has thus mimicked a signature in the frequency analyzes expected in much older galaxies.
It was known that the James Webb Space Telescope discovered a large number of particularly distant galaxies immediately after it started work. However, there were also doubts about the alleged finds, but the first checks had already been positive. In part, the “quiet, orderly discs” of the found galaxies have challenged our understanding of how the first galaxies formed in the “crowded, chaotic early Universe.” A research group had recently suggested that some of the putative galaxies are “dark stars” that have only been described in theory and that draw their energy from dark matter.
The James Webb Space Telescope looks into space at the Lagrange point L2 away from the Sun, Earth and Moon, so that their thermal radiation does not disturb the infrared telescope. A huge protective screen blocks them – with a sun protection factor of one million. After its start-up, it had discovered many candidates for galaxies that might have existed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The trend of the finds had suggested that the space telescope could actually revolutionize our understanding of the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. According to the University of Texas ten other finds are currently being examined, which are galaxies that could be older than “Maisie’s Galaxy”.
(mho)