New News – Astronomers confirm the detection of the oldest observed galaxy nearly 13.5 billion light years away, just hundreds of years before the Big Bang.
The galaxy has been named GHZ2/GLASS-z12, which was first seen in July 2022, shortly after the supertelescope the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was activated.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers were able to determine the age of the galaxy at only 367 million years before the big bang.
After detecting the galaxy, astronomers published their findings in a journal in November.
However, astronomers and scientists still want to confirm the results using other instruments.
ALMA pointed 66 antennas 12 meters long at the galaxy and found nearby oxygen emission lines. Follow-up analysis confirmed that it was related to GHZ2/GLASS-z12.
Astronomers are looking for radiance because when light passes through oxygen, it is re-emitted over a certain range of wavelengths.
Oxygen is also created relatively quickly compared to most other elements, so it is often used to investigate distant galaxies.
“We performed detailed tests on the observations to make sure that these are really strong detections, and very difficult to explain through other interpretations,” said Tom Bakx, an astronomer at the University of Nagoya in Japan and one of the team leaders at Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory, quoted from Science News.
The small variations in where galaxies appear and the emission of oxygen suggest that the big bang when the galaxies formed may have pushed oxygen out into intergalactic space.
While intergalactic space is considered to be largely empty, with less than one atom of matter per square meter, the vast expanse of space between galaxies means matter between galaxies makes up about 50 to 80% of all the ordinary matter in the universe.
The team can use their tests to theorize that galaxies formed elements heavier than hydrogen and helium relatively early.
Hydrogen and helium are the most abundant elements in the universe and make up most of them before stars formed and started creating new elements by smashing atoms together in their cores. It is believed that the elements remain locked within the star until the first star explodes, allowing them to spread throughout the universe.
That early galaxies like GHZ2/GLASS-z22 had oxygen early in the universe’s formation provides clues about the timeline of the first stars, which are still not directly observed.
The Big Bang, which is theorized as the beginning of the universe, is thought to have occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.
If true, this means that GHZ2-GLASS-z12 formed in its early days, just hundreds of millions of years after the big bang.
“These deep ALMA observations provide strong evidence of the existence of galaxies within the first few hundred million years after the big bang, and confirm the surprising results of Webb’s observations,” Jorge Zavala, Bakx co-leader at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said.
“The combined forces of Webb and ALMA’s array of radio telescopes give us the confidence to push our cosmic horizon ever closer to the dawn of the universe,” he added.
