James Webb Space Telescope confirms 'Maisie's galaxy' is one of the earliest ever seen

Apr 6, 2023
32
10
535
Visit site
Given the Hubble tension, this seems like a real problem. Depending on which side of that argument you fall on, this galaxy could have come into existence at the time of, or just before the BB.
 
Space.com reported, "To do this, they made follow-up observations with the JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). This allowed Finkelstein and colleagues to look at spectral lines created in light data, dictated by the absorptions and emissions of chemical elements at specific wavelengths. From there, they could pinpoint the actual redshift of Maisie's galaxy. It appeared to be 11.4. This means Maisie's galaxy is technically seen more recently in the universe than initially estimated, by a factor of tens of millions of years. Nonetheless, it is still considered immensely old. The JWST captured the galaxy as it was just 390 million years after the Big Bang."

I use cosmology calculators like Ned Wright, https://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/toolbox/calculators.html, and some others.

Using defaults and z=11.4, "The age at redshift z was 0.399 Gyr. The light travel time was 13.323 Gyr.
The comoving radial distance, which goes into Hubble's law, is 9937.0 Mpc or 32.410 Gly."

Changing input values for H0 can show variation and differences. The comoving radial distance indicates this galaxy today, is at least 32.410 Gly from Earth. Using H0 = 69 km/s/Mpc, space is expanding at that distance from Earth 2.2870644E+00 or about 2.29 x c velocity. There is the issue of the angular size diameter too for a 1 arcsecond size compared to what is observed. The paper reference shows there is no metal free gas found in Maisie's galaxy. The primordial gas clouds postulated created during BBN remain unobserved like Population III stars too or the primordial gas during the cosmic dark ages.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jan Steinman
@Brad: Galaxies appears after the hot big bang era ended since the first 400,000 years of it is inhabited by a hydrogen/helium plasma that can't make stars yet. It is after recombination that molecular clouds can form and go on to form stars.

The expansion history of the universe is less relevant to optical light redshift measurements anyway. They can directly tell how far back in time the emission happened.
 

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts