Astronomers have discovered what may be the oldest and most distant galaxy ever observed, which formed almost shortly after the Big Bang that dates the beginning of the universe, and may have been teeming with the first generation of stars.
The researchers said Thursday that the galaxy, dubbed (HD1), dates back more than 300 million years after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
Evidence indicates that (HD1) formed stars at an astonishing rate, perhaps about 100 new stars per year, or alternatively it contained what might be the largest known black hole, they said.
The researchers gathered their information from telescopes in Hawaii and Chile and the Orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope. They hope to obtain more explanations using the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be operational within months after it was launched by the US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in December.
“Observing information about HD1 is limited and other physical properties are still mysterious, including its shape, total mass and metallicity,” said astronomer Yuichi Harikan, lead author of the research detailing the discovery, which was published in the Astrophysical Journal. Metallicity refers to the proportion of substances other than hydrogen and helium that were present in the early universe.
“The difficulty is that this is almost the limit of the capabilities of current telescopes in terms of sensitivity and wavelength,” Harrikan added.
The researchers said that HD1, which is likely to have a mass 10 billion times greater than our sun, may have had first-generation stars. These so-called Group C stars are extremely massive, luminous, hot, short-lived and composed almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium.