The galaxy, called HD1, 13.5 billion light-years away, was formed just over 300 million years after the universe evolved 13.8 billion years ago, according to a group of international astronomers, including Harvard and the Smithsonian’s Joint Center for Astrophysics. researchers. Scientists do not yet know exactly what they discovered.
One possibility is that they see the formation of stars staring at a dizzying rate of up to a hundred per year, including possibly the very first stars in the universe, and the other is that the galaxy includes the earliest known supermassive black hole 100 million times the Sun.
Source: NASA, EST, P. Oesch / Yale, The Harvard Gazette
If future observations confirm the data to date, HD1 is about 100 million years earlier than the earliest and most distant astronomical object known to date, the GN-z11 galaxy.
The researchers used data obtained with Hawaiian and Chilean binoculars and the Spitzer Space Telescope. More information is expected from the James Webb Space Telescope, released by the U.S. space agency NASA in December, which will be operational in a few months.
The information obtained so far from HD1 observations is limited, and its physical data such as shape, total weight, or metallicity are not known, said Harikane Juicsi, an astrophysicist at the University of Tokyo, the lead author of the publication.
Metallicity, or metallicity, indicates the proportion of matter other than the gases that make up the primordial universe, hydrogen, and helium.
According to the researchers, HD1, which weighs perhaps 10 billion times more than the Sun, may have been populated by the first generation of stars. The so-called III. population stars are thought to be extremely massive, bright, hot, short-lived, and composed almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium.
HD1 has been observed to emit extremely strong ultraviolet light, much more than ordinary stars. One explanation for the extreme UV brightness may be that there is a supermassive black hole inside the galaxy that weighs 100 million times more than the Sun.
Many stellar systems, including the Milky Way, contain supermassive black holes, the earliest known formation to date, formed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
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