Last week, a team operating the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the discovery of Earendel, a star that twinkled 12.9 billion years ago, just 900 million years after the Big Bang.
Another international team of astronomers claims to have discovered the oldest and most distant collection of starlight ever using one of the world’s largest telescopes.
Just 330 million years after the Big Bang, a reddish blob called HD1 spewed out massive amounts of energy. Until now, no one has been in that world of time. HD2, a second blob, seems to be almost as far away.
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Scientists aren’t sure whether the galaxy is a starburst galaxy with a large, active supermassive black hole at its heart or a quasar with a massive, active supermassive black hole at its center.
“Answering questions about the nature of a resource so distant can be difficult,” says Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astrophysicist Fabio Pacucci.
HD1 was discovered as part of a study of galaxies from the beginning of the Universe, the results of which have been published in The Astrophysical Journal and are also available on arXiv.
The red color is caused by a light source moving away from us, and is known as redshift. This causes the wavelength of light coming from that source to shift toward the redder end of the electromagnetic spectrum, hence the term “redshift.”
Other galaxies appear red-shifted as the Universe expands; the greater the distance in space-time, the greater the redshift. Astronomers can use this effect to calculate how far light has traveled to reach us.
“Studying Earendel will be a window into an era of the universe we don’t know, but that has led to everything we do know.”
Hubble observed the farthest individual star ever detected, nicknamed Earendel and indicated by the arrow: pic.twitter.com/1F369N5n0w
— Hubble (@NASAHubble) March 31, 2022
The HD1 bulb is intriguing. It is incredibly luminous in ultraviolet wavelengths, implying that the galaxy was undergoing very intense activity. The number was staggering: more than 100 stars a year. That’s ten times more than a galaxy in the early Universe should have.
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The very first population of stars to form in the Universe was more massive, brighter and hotter than modern stars,” says Paccuci† According to astronomers, the road to the universe as we know it began about 100 million years after the Big Bang, when the hydrogen and helium from the primordial explosion began to condense into the first stars, known as Population 3 stars Populations 1 and 2, which contained large amounts of heavier elements are present in galaxies today.
Such stars, made entirely of hydrogen and helium, have never been seen, and they would have been much larger and brighter than the stars we see today.