Hebe
A small object three kiloparsecs from GN-z11, 440 million years after the Big Bang, has been named Hebe.
On 20 March 2026, three companion preprints went up on arXiv reporting a small clump of light three kiloparsecs from the galaxy GN-z11, at a redshift of 10.6 — about 440 million years after the Big Bang — that emits doubly ionised helium and a single Balmer line of hydrogen and nothing else. The team has named it Hebe.
Hebe stands for Helium Balmer Emitter.1 He II at 1640 ångströms, Hγ at 4341, silence at every line a heavier element would draw. To strip a second electron off helium you need photons hotter than 54 electron-volts, which in our universe is the work of stars without metals — stars hot and short-lived and very rare for the last twelve billion years, because metal-free stars stop being metal-free as soon as one of them dies. Maiolino et al., Rusta et al., and a third paper by Übler et al. confirming the hydrogen line all read the spectrum the same way. They argue this is the first generation. Population III. The kind cosmologists have been hunting for forty years and have only ever seen by inference.
Hebe is also the Greek goddess of youth, daughter of Zeus and Hera, who poured nectar into the cups of the gods on Olympus until she married Heracles and Ganymede took the role. And on 1 July 1847 a retired postmaster in Driesen, Karl Ludwig Hencke — the first amateur ever to find an asteroid — caught his second one in a small refractor and asked Carl Friedrich Gauss what to call it. Gauss said Hebe. The asteroid was for a long time taken to be the parent body of the H-type chondrites that fall through European museums; that has been doubted lately. Hencke's Hebe has waited a hundred and seventy-nine years for an object older than itself to share its name.
Naming for the acronym is a working scientist's habit. Naming for the goddess is a poet's habit. Sometimes the scientist is also a poet without meaning to be.
The Übler companion paper writes the expansion as HeIIum Balmer Emitter, with the doubled-i of "He II" tucked into "helium." A small joke for spectroscopists. Maiolino et al., The search for Population III: Confirmation of a HeII emitter with no metal lines at z=10.6 (arXiv:2603.20362); Rusta et al., The Pristine HeII Emitter near GN-z11: Constraining the Mass Distribution of the First Stars (arXiv:2603.20363); Übler et al., GA-NIFS & JADES: Confirmation of pristine gas near GN-z11 (arXiv:2603.20360). All three submitted 20 March 2026. For Hencke and the naming of 6 Hebe, see Britannica. ↩