The HD1 galaxy probably formed 330 million years after the Big Bang.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, CAMBRIDGE — A fiery red object in the early universe has been identified as farthest galaxy found so far. Astronomers reveal this object is a galaxy that existed 330 million years after the Big Bang.
Its dim light, spread out by the expansion of the Universe, would have to travel 13.5 billion light years to reach Earth. Its discoverers named the galaxy HD1. The naming represents something mysterious.
Scientists aren’t entirely sure what galaxies are. They haven’t been able to determine whether it’s a stellar explosion galaxy, which is positively churning with star formation, or a quasar, with supermassive black hole large active at the center.
The growth of black holes to supermassive sizes so quickly after the blink of an eye has posed a challenge to models of black hole formation and evolution.
“Answering questions about the nature of such distant sources can be challenging,” said astrophysicist Fabio Pacucci of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. SciencealertThursday (7/4/2022).
Pacucci says this is like guessing the nationality of a ship from a flag being flown, while far on land, with the ship in the middle of a storm and thick fog.
“People may be able to see some of the colors and shapes of the flag, but not all of it. It’s ultimately a long game of analysis and rules out scenarios that don’t make sense,” he said.
Detecting objects from the early universe is very difficult. Even quasars, the brightest objects in the entire cosmos, are dimmed across the vast range of spacetime, to the point that the most powerful telescopes struggle to catch their light. HD1 was discovered as part of a survey to find galaxies in the early universe, the results of which are detailed in a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and also available at arXiv.
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