Scientists have spotted the farthest galaxy ever

The most distant object ever seen by an astronomer is a galaxy.

HD1 is a candidate for a galaxy that is some 13 billion light-years away. In an accompanying paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, scientists have begun to speculate about what the universe is.

HD1 may be forming stars at an astounding rate and is possibly even home to Population III stars, the universe's very first stars, which, until now, have never been observed. HD1 may have a black hole about 100 million times the mass of the Sun.

"Answering questions about the nature of a source so far away can be challenging," says the lead author of the MNRAS study, co-author of the discovery paper on ApJ and an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. Some colors and shapes of the flag can be seen, but not in their entirety. It is a long game of analysis and exclusion of implausible scenarios.

HD1 is very bright in the light. Some energetic processes are occurring there, and it is possible that they occurred billions of years ago.

HD1 was thought to be a standard starburst galaxy, a galaxy that is creating stars at a high rate. HD1 would be forming more than 100 stars every single year after calculating how many stars it was producing. This is at least 10 times higher than what we expect.

The team suspected that HD1 might not be normal.

The very first population of stars that formed in the universe were more massive, hotter and brighter than modern stars. Population III stars are capable of producing more UV light than normal stars, which could clarify the extreme ultraviolet luminosity of HD1.

HD1's extreme luminosity could be explained by a black hole. The region around the black hole may be emitting high energy photons.

If that is the case, it would be by far the earliest supermassive black hole known to humankind, observed much closer in time to the Bigbang compared to the current record-holder.

HD1 would be a giant baby in the delivery room of the early universe, according to the astronomer who co-authored the study.

HD1 was discovered after more than 1,200 hours of observing time with a number of telescopes.

It was difficult to find HD1 out of more than one million objects, says Yuichi Harikane, an astronomer at the University of Tokyo.

The team used the ALMA to confirm the distance, which is 100 million light years further than the current record-holder.

The research team will use the James Webb Space Telescope to verify HD1's distance from Earth. If current calculations are correct, HD1 will be the most distant.

The team will be able to confirm if one of their theories is correct with the same observations.

The black hole in HD1 must have grown out of a massive seed at an unprecedented rate.

More information: A Search for H-Dropout Lyman Break Galaxies at z~12-16, arXiv:2112.09141 [astro-ph.GA] arxiv.org/abs/2112.09141 , Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters.

Are the 13 drop-out sources of the starburst galaxies or quasars accepted for publication?

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