An international team of astronomers has detected the most distant galaxy, 13.5 billion light-years from Earth, “shortly” after the Universe was “born”.
The galaxy, which has the technical designation HD1, was discovered after more than 1,000 hours of observations with several telescopes, including the Spitzer space telescope, deactivated two years ago, and the ALMA radio telescope in Chile.
According to the authors of the discovery, described in an article published in the Astrophysical Journal, the galaxy may have a supermassive black hole, with a mass about 100 million times that of the Sun, and be forming the first stars of the Universe, which , according to the Big Bang theory, will be 13.8 billion years old.
The team hopes to confirm both hypotheses, inferred by the extreme brightness emitted by the galaxy in ultraviolet light, with observations made with the new James Webb space telescope, in orbit since January and which is prepared to “reveal” the first galaxies and stars of the Universe.
According to a statement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States, which participated in the study, the previous record for the most distant galaxy belonged to GN-z11, which is 13.4 billion light-years from Earth. .
A week ago, the discovery of the most distant star, 12.9 billion light-years, was announced.
Earendel, which means “morning star” in Old English, will be at least 50 times the mass of the Sun and millions of times brighter, having been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
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