A galaxy has been discovered by an international team of astronomers, including experts from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
In the Astrophysical Journal, a candidate galaxy named HD1 was described this week and is located at a distance of 13.5 billion light-years. A companion publication published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters takes a go at speculating on the galaxy’s actual composition and structure.
Two suggestions are put up by the group: Astonishingly, HD1 may be creating stars at an incredible pace, and it may even be home to the universe’s earliest stars, Population III stars, which have never before been spotted. Other possibilities include a 100 million-times the mass of our Sun supermassive black hole in HD1.
MNRAS research lead author Fabio Pacucci, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics and a co-author of the discovery publication on ApJ, explains that answering concerns about the nature of a source so far away can be difficult.
“It’s like trying to figure out the country of origin of a ship just on the flag it flies from afar ashore in a storm and thick fog. Some of the flag’s colors and shapes can be made out, but not all of them. After a protracted process of study and elimination, we’ve arrived at a conclusion.
Ultraviolet light shines brilliantly on HD1. This is explained by Pacucci’s theory that “certain energetic activities are occurring there or, better yet, did occur some billions of years ago”.
Initially, it was assumed to be A normal starburst galaxy, a galaxy that is forming stars at a rapid pace, by the researchers. According to their calculations, HD1 would be creating more than 100 stars a year at a “amazing rate.” These galaxies are at least 10 times more active than we expected.”
HD1 was suspected of being a different kind of star at this point.
According to Pacucci, “the original population of stars that originated in the cosmos were more enormous, brighter, and hotter than the stars we see today. We can better understand the features of HD1’s stars if we believe they are stars from the third generation, or Population III.
HD1’s exceptional ultraviolet brightness may be explained by the fact that Population III stars are capable of emitting more UV radiation than regular stars. HD1’s exceptional brightness, on the other hand, may be explained by a supermassive black hole.
While consuming vast amounts of gas, a black hole may release high-energy photons from its surroundings Since it would have been discovered considerably earlier in history, it would be the first supermassive black hole ever discovered by humans.
Avi Loeb, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics and co-author of the MNRAS paper, argues that HD1 “would resemble a huge baby in the delivery room of the early cosmos.” By a factor of two, it breaks the record for the greatest quasar redshift on record. This is a fantastic achievement.”
Observations using the Subaru Telescope, the VISTA Telescope, the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, and the Spitzer Space Telescope resulted in the discovery of HD1.
Yuichi Harikane, an astronomer at the University of Tokyo who found the galaxy, says, “It was really hard effort to identify HD1 out of more than 700,000 objects.” I got shivers when I saw HD1 because its red hue matched the predicted features of a galaxy 13.5 billion light-years away so nicely.
As a result, they made more measurements with ALMA, which confirmed the galaxy’s distance as being 100 million light years beyond that of previous record holder GN-z11.The study team will observe HD1 once again shortly with the James Webb Space Telescope to verify its distance from Earth. HD1 is predicted to be the most distant and ancient galaxy ever observed if current predictions are right.
HD1’s identification can be further explored and confirmed if a theory put out by the research team is valid based on these same data points. According to Loeb, a black hole in HD1 formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang and grew out of a gigantic seed at an extraordinary rate. It appears that nature is more creative than humans are,” he says.
Published By : Ankit Singh
Edited By : Khushi Thakur
