An international team of astronomers discovered a galaxy It is the most distant astronomical object in history, 100 million light-years more than the current record, according to researchers published in the Astrophysical Journal.

baptized in the name of HD1The galaxy is about 13.5 billion light-years away, 300 million years after the Big Bang.

In an accompanying article published in Monthly notifications from the letters of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), Scientists are beginning to speculate what exactly a galaxy is.

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The team proposes two ideas: HD1 may be forming stars at an astonishing rate, and it may host Population III stars, the first stars in the universe, which have not yet been observed. Another possibility is that HD1 contains a supermassive black hole with a mass of 100 million times the mass of our sun.

Answering questions about the nature of such a remote source can be difficult. It’s a statement Fabio Paccucci, lead author of the MNRAS study, co-author and astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the United States.

“It’s like guessing the nationality of a ship from the flag it’s flying, its far on land, and the ship in the middle of a thick, stormy mist,” he explains. One can see perhaps some of the colors and shapes of the flag, but not in its entirety. In short, it is a long game of analysis and the exclusion of unreasonable scenarios.”

HD1 is extremely bright in ultraviolet light. To explain this, “Some active processes are happening there or, better yet, they happened a few billion years ago,” pointing to.

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100 star model per year

At first, the researchers hypothesized that HD1 was a galaxy with a standard starburst, a galaxy that creates stars at a high rate. But after counting how many stars HD1 was producing, they got an “incredible rate: HD1 will form more than 100 stars every year. That’s at least ten times higher than what we expect for these galaxies.” This is when the team began to suspect that HD1 might not form ordinary stars.

“The first group of stars that formed in the universe were much denser, brighter, and hotter than modern stars,” Pacuchi explains. If we assume that the stars produced in HD1 are these early stars, or III stars, their properties can be more easily explained. In fact, group C stars are able to produce more ultraviolet light than regular stars, which can illuminate the extreme ultraviolet brightness of HD1″.

However, a supermassive black hole could also explain the intense luminosity of HD1. By swallowing huge amounts of gas, the region around the black hole can emit high-energy photons.

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In this case, It would be by far a supermassive black hole The oldest known to mankind, It was observed much closer to the Big Bang than the current record holder.

“HD1 would represent a giant baby in the delivery room of the early universe,” said Avi Loeb, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics and co-author of the MNRAS study. It breaks the largest redshift on record for a quasar by nearly two times, which is a remarkable achievement.”

HD1 was discovered after more than 1,200 hours of observation using the Subaru telescope, the Vesta telescope, the UK’s Infrared Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

“Finding the HD1 among more than 700,000 items has been a very difficult task Yuichi Harikan, an astronomer at the University of Tokyo who discovered the galaxy, said. The red color of HD1 surprisingly matches the expected characteristics of a galaxy 13.5 billion light-years away. Which gave me goosebumps when I found it.”

New record

The team then performed follow-up observations using the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submatrix (ALMA). To confirm the distance of 100 million light-years from GN-z11, the current record holder for the farthest galaxy.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the team of researchers will soon re-observe HD1 to verify its distance from Earth. If the current calculations are correct, then HD1 will be the most distant and oldest galaxy ever recorded.

The same observations will allow the team to dig deeper into HD1’s identity and confirm whether one of their theories is correct. Forming a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, The HD1 black hole must have grown from a massive seed at an unprecedented rate Loeb says. Once again, nature seems more creative than us.”