From the sea – A global team of astronomers has found the most distant space object ever, according to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
quote Accuweather.com (9/4) this is a distant galaxy called HD1, about 13.5 billion light years from Earth.
The researchers offer two ideas about what galaxies really are.
In the first paper, published this week in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society LettersHD1 can create stars at an astonishing rate and may even be home to what are known as Population III stars.
Population III stars are the first stars in the universe, which researchers say have not been seen until now.
The second idea the researchers put forward, in another paper published this week in Astronomical JournalHD1 can accommodate a supermassive black hole about 100 million times the mass of our Sun.
“Answering questions about the nature of sources so remote can be challenging,” said Fabio Pacucci, lead author of the paper published in MNRASL.
“It’s like guessing the nationality of a ship from a flag being flown, while far on land, with the ship in a storm and heavy fog.”
Pacucci said it was “ultimately a long game of analysis and rules out scenarios that make no sense.”
The scientists say the quasar or black hole hypothesis is feasible because the UV luminosity they observe can be generated by black holes.
But the scientists wrote, “More likely than this ‘extreme scenario’ is a situation where the UV luminosity … source is contributed by a combination of star formation and black hole accretion.”
Further data, from the James Webb Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope and others will be crucial to answering the open questions of this study, the researchers said.
“HD1 will represent the giant baby in the delivery room of the early universe,” said MNRAS study co-author Avi Loeb, in a press release.
quote Livescience.com (8/4) the galaxy, which may exist about 13.5 billion light-years from Earth, has broken object records astronomy farthest ever seen.
That age puts this stellar pool, now dubbed HD1, among a time of total darkness — about 14 billion years ago in the universe. One of the lights that just developed as a clump of dust and gas. grew into their cosmic destiny.
“The first galaxies formed about a hundred million years after the Big Bang. They are one millionth the mass of the Milky Way and much denser,” study researcher and Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told Live Science via email.
“One way to think of it is as a building block in today’s galaxy construction projects, such as our own Milky Way.”
The researchers found HD1 in data collected over 1,200 hours of observation time using the Subaru Telescope, VISTA Telescope, UK Infrared Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope.
They specifically looked at redshift, a phenomenon in which light waves stretch or become redder as an object moves away from the observer. In this case, the redshift suggests the HD1 is very far away.
The researchers found that the red wavelength is equivalent to that of a galaxy 13.5 billion light years away.
HD1 also appears to be growing at a rapid rate — about 100 stars each year, or at least 10 times the rate predicted for a stellar explosion galaxy known to produce stars at unusually high speeds.
These stars are also more massive, brighter (in ultraviolet wavelengths) and hotter than younger stars, the researchers found.
To find out HD1’s true identity, the researchers looked for X-rays, which are emitted when material is eaten by the black hole’s gravity.
“If HD1 were a black hole, we would have to look at the X-ray emission from it. If we don’t find X-rays, the emission must be from a massive star,” Loeb said.
Source: Accuweather.com and Livescience.com
Note: A light year is defined as the distance light travels in one year when it passes through a vacuum, the equivalent of 9.46 trillion kilometers or 9,467,280,000,000 km = (9.46 x 1012 ) km.
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