It’s official! Maisie's Galaxy is one of the earliest known galaxies

The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has helped scientists unravel the myriad mysteries of the universe. Astronomers have been ableto witness some of the rare cosmological events that shape the understanding of the cosmos.

Now, thanks to JWST, astronomers have been able to establish one of the earlier galaxies known in the universe.

Called the Maisie's Galaxy, it is said to have formed about 390 million years after the Big Bang. For reference, the universe as a whole is about 13.77 billion years old.

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Maisie’s Galaxy was named after the daughter of the project’s principal investigator, Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.

The image was first taken in June 2022 as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS), and it was recently confirmed that the galaxy that was detected last summer is in fact among the earliest ever found.

“The exciting thing about Maisie's galaxy is that it was one of the first distant galaxies identified by JWST, and of that set, it's the first to actually be spectroscopically confirmed," Steven Finkelstein said.

It is touted to be one of the four earliest confirmed galaxies observed.

The latest analysis was led by Pablo Arrabal Haro, a postdoctoral research associate at the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory.

Astronomersevaluating 10 other galaxies

The CEERS team is currently evaluating about 10 other galaxies that might be from an era even earlier than Maisie's.

It is not easy to determine the timeframe of galaxies in the early universe as it is expanding at an accelerating rate.

Most objects that are outside of our galaxy appear to be receding and takea bit of time to figure out.

Hence to calculatehow old it is, astronomersmeasure its redshift—the amount that its colour has been shifted due to its motion away from us.

Since we live in an expanding universe, the farther back in time we look, the higher an object's redshift.

The estimates of redshifts were based on photometry, the brightness of light in images using a small number of wide-frequency filters.

Those estimates were made using data collected by CEERS during its originally allotted time for the telescope's first observing season.

"This was a kind of weird case," Finkelstein said. "Of the many tens of high redshift candidates that have been observed spectroscopically, this is the only instance of the true redshift being much less than our initial guess."

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