Astronomers have been leapfrogging each other. A group using the Hubble Space Telescope announced last week that they had discovered Earendel, a star that was only 900 million years old when it twinkled.
A group of international scientists say they have discovered a reddish blob that appears to be the earliest and most distant collection of starlight ever seen. That realm of time is not known. HD2 is almost as far away.
Astronomers can't guess what these blobs are, but they can observe them with the new James Webb Space Telescope. Astronomers say they could shed light on a crucial phase in the universe as it evolved from pristine primordial fire into planets, life and us.
As a kid, I am excited to see the first firework in a show that is highly anticipated.
A team led by Yuichi Harikane of the University of Tokyo spent 1,200 hours using various ground-based telescopes to search for very early galaxies. The Astrophysical Journal and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society contained their findings. Sky & Telescope magazine reported their work earlier this year.
An object moving away from us in the expanding universe is called moving away from us. As the sound of an ambulance sirens shifts to a lower tone, an object's light shifts to longer redder wavelengths. HD1 was the reddest one they could find after sifting through some 70,000 objects.
Dr. Harikane said in a statement that his red color matched the expected characteristics of a galaxy 13 billion light years away.
The redshift is derived from obtaining a spectrum of the object and measuring how much the wavelength of the characteristic elements have changed. Dr. Harikane and his team got a tentative redshift for HD1 of 13, meaning that the wavelength of the light emitted by an oxygen. The redshift of the other blob has not been determined.
It was found in the hunting ground of the telescope and will be able to confirm the redshift measurement.
If the redshift from ALMA can be confirmed, then this would be a spectacular object.
The road to the universe began about 100 million years after the Big bang, when hydrogen and helium created in the explosion began to condense into the first stars, known as Population 3 stars. The stars made of hydrogen and helium would have been much bigger and brighter than the ones we see today. They would have burned hot and died fast in the supernova explosions that started the chemical evolution that polluted a pristine universe with elements like oxygen and iron.
Dr. Pacucci said they thought HD1 and HD2 were a type of starburst galaxies, which billow with new stars. They discovered that HD1 seemed to be producing stars more quickly than usual.
There is a possibility that the first ultraluminous Population 3 stars were born in this galaxy. Another explanation is that the material splashing into the black hole is 100 million times the mass of the sun. Astronomers don't know how a black hole could have grown so big.
Was it born in the chaos of the Big bang or was it just stupendously hungry?
A co-author of the paper said that HD1 would be a giant baby in the delivery room of the early universe.
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