Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have confirmed that a distant smudge of light named for a lucky birthday girl on Earth is one of the earliest known galaxies in the universe.
The object — named "Maisie's galaxy" in honor of lead researcher Steven Finkelstein's daughter, who was celebrating her birthday when the object was discovered last year — began emitting light more than 13 billion years ago, or roughly 390 million years after the Big Bang, the team found. This impressive age, reported Aug. 14 in the journal Nature, places Maisie's galaxy among the four oldest galaxies in the universe that have had their ages confirmed by spectroscopy, a technique that splits light into its component frequencies to better reveal its brightness, heat and chemical composition.
