The famous phrase, "In a galaxy far, far away," has a whole new meaning.
A group of astronomers announced on Thursday that they have located the most distant astronomical object ever, as the galaxy named HD1 is more than 13.5 billion light-years away, according to findings in The Astrophysical Journal and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters (MNRAS).
The researchers said that HD1 existed about 330 million years after the Big Bang, according to Astronomy.com.
The galaxy is "extremely bright in ultraviolet light," meaning that it would produce stars at a high rate, and if it's a starburst galaxy, then it would create over a 100 stars a year. They then realized that HD1 produced stars at a much higher rate, up to 10 times more than the usual starburst galaxy, according to Space.com
"The very first population of stars that formed in the universe were more massive, more luminous and hotter than modern stars," Fabio Pacucci of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the MNRAS study, and co-author in the discovery paper on ApJ, said, according to EurekAlert.
"If we assume the stars produced in HD1 are these first, or Population III, stars, then its properties could be explained more easily. In fact, Population III stars are capable of producing more UV light than normal stars, which could clarify the extreme ultraviolet luminosity of HD1."
Population III stars are those born from the Big Bang, but they have never been spotted by astronomers.
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"Such stars, composed of only hydrogen and helium, have never been observed, and they would have been much bigger and brighter than the ones in the universe today," according to The New York Times. "They would have burned hot and died fast in supernova explosions that then jump-started the chemical evolution polluting a pristine universe with elements like oxygen and iron, the stuff of us."
Astronomer Yuichi Harikane led the team of researchers, including Pacucci, at the University of Tokyo, as they spent more than 1,200 hours using the Subaru Telescope, VISTA Telescope, UK Infrared Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescopes to search for the objects.
"It was very hard work to find HD1 out of more than 700,000 objects," Harikane said. "HD1's red color matched the expected characteristics of a galaxy 13.5 billion light-years away surprisingly well, giving me a little bit of goosebumps when I found it."
Researchers added that a supermassive black hole could be the cause of the luminosity of HD1. If it were a supermassive black hole, then it would easily be the earliest one ever found. Astronomer Avi Loeb, a co-author on the MNRAS paper, said that this finding is important to understanding more about the early universe.
"HD1 would represent a giant baby in the delivery room of the early universe," Loeb said. "It breaks the highest quasar redshift on record by almost a factor of two, a remarkable feat."
The group of astronomers plan to use NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to further explore the galaxy.
"I am excited as a kid who spots the very first firework in a magnificent and highly anticipated show," Pacucci said. "This could well be one of the first glimmers of light to illuminate the cosmos in a show that ultimately created every star, planet and even flower that we see around us today — more than 13 billion years later."
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