The Maisie’s Galaxy, one of the earliest galaxies in the universe, has been identified as the red blob first noticed in a photo obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope.
About 390 million years after the Big Bang, this galaxy was born. The discovery was made by the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) during observations performed in June 2022.
The most recent spectroscopic analysis performed by the James Webb Space Telescope has verified the existence of this far-off galaxy in the early universe. It is remarkable since it was one of the first distant galaxies discovered by JWST and the first to have its existence confirmed by spectroscopy.
The daughter of the primary investigator, Maisie, inspired the naming of the galaxy. The redshift principle, which states that light from quickly moving objects moves towards the red end of the spectrum as a result of the expanding universe, is what determines how far away a galaxy is from us.
Initially, the researchers used photometry—a technique that measures the brightness of light in photographs through various frequency filters—to ascertain the redshift of Maisie’s Galaxy.
The redshift number obtained by this method—abbreviated as z—was initially around 12, indicating that the galaxy formed about 366 million years after the Big Bang.
However, a thorough investigation using the spectroscopic NIRSpec instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope revealed a corrected redshift value of z=11.4.
To add more, the galaxy formed about 390 million years after the Big Bang. With the aid of spectroscopy, the redshift may be measured more precisely, revealing important details about the galaxy’s early cosmic history.