NASA’s James Webb discovers one of the OLDEST galaxies in the universe – a system of stars that formed just 390 million years after the Big Bang

It was launched to look back to the beginning of time and take pictures of it the very first stars to shine in space.

Now, in the latest of its many exciting discoveries to date, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered one of the oldest galaxies in the universe.

Formed just 390 million years after the Big Bang, the Maisie’s galaxy is named after the astronomer’s daughter who first saw it on her birthday.

Scientists say it’s one of the four earliest confirmed galaxies ever seen — though they’re currently evaluating about 10 others that may be from an epoch even earlier than Maisie’s.

“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,” said Steven Finkelstein, who led the study led by the University of Texas. at Austin.

The way astronomers determine the age of a galaxy is complicated.

It involves working out when light left an object, which is calculated by measuring the galaxy’s redshift.

This is the amount that its color has shifted because of its movement away from Earth.

Therefore, since we live in an expanding universe, the higher an object’s redshift, the older it is.

In estimating the age of Maisie’s galaxy, Finkelstein and his team first based the redshift on photometry, the brightness of light in images using a small number of wide frequency filters.

This gave them a rough idea, but to arrive at a more accurate estimate, they had to request new measurements with JWST’s spectroscopic instrument, NIRSpec (Near InfraRed Spectrograph).

This splits an object’s light into many different narrow frequencies to more accurately identify its chemical composition, heat release, intrinsic brightness, and relative motion.

According to this latest spectroscopic analysis, the Maisie galaxy has a redshift of z=11.4.

The researchers also studied a galaxy called CEERS-93316, which was originally estimated to exist just 250 million years after the Big Bang.

The researchers also studied a galaxy called CEERS-93316 (pictured), which was originally estimated to have formed just 250 million years after the Big Bang. It later turned out, however, that scientists had caught on to the blue hue — and it actually formed a billion years after the universe was formed.

However, this became apparent after conducting the follow-up analysis CEERS-93316 had a more modest redshift of z=4.9, which corresponds to about a billion years after the universe was formed.

The reason the initial calculation was wrong was because scientists later discovered that hot gas in CEERS-93316 emitted so much light in a few narrow frequency bands associated with oxygen and hydrogen that the galaxy appeared much bluer than it actually was.

This bluer hue mimicked the signature astronomers expected to see in very early galaxies.

However, it is actually an oddity of the photometric method which only happens for objects with a redshift of about 4.9.

“This was kind of a weird case,” Finkelstein said.

“Of the many dozen high redshift candidates observed spectroscopically, this is the only instance of the true redshift much smaller than our initial estimate.”

Not only did the galaxy look unnaturally blue, it also turned out to be much brighter than current models predict for galaxies that formed so early in the Universe.

“It would have been very challenging to explain how the universe could create such a huge galaxy so quickly,” Finkelstein said.

“So I think that was probably always the most likely outcome because it was so extreme, so bright, with such an apparently high redshift.”

JWST cost $10bn (£7.4bn) to build and launched in December 2021 from the European spaceport near Kourou, French Guiana.

The ultimate goal is to look 13.5 billion years further back in time to a point within just 100-200 million years of the Big Bang.

The discovery of Maisie’s galaxy has been revealed in the journal Nature.

The James Webb Telescope: NASA’s $10 billion telescope is designed to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies

The James Webb telescope has been described as a “time machine” that could help unlock the secrets of our universe.

The telescope will be used to look back at the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5 billion years ago, and to observe the sources of stars, exoplanets and even the moons and planets of our solar system.

The massive telescope, which has already cost more than $7bn (£5bn), is thought to be a successor to the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope

The James Webb telescope and most of its instruments have an operating temperature of about 40 Kelvin – about minus 387 Fahrenheit (minus 233 degrees Celsius).

It is the world’s largest and most powerful orbital space telescope, capable of looking back 100-200 million years after the Big Bang.

The orbiting infrared observatory is designed to be about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA likes to think of James Webb as a successor to Hubble rather than a replacement, as the two will be working together for a while.

The Hubble telescope was launched on April 24, 1990 via the space shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It orbits Earth at a speed of about 17,000 mph (27,300 km/h) in low Earth orbit at about 340 miles altitude.