An international team of astronomers has discovered the most distant astronomical object ever observed. A distant galaxy called HD1 and is about 13.5 billion light-years away.

Details of the find are described in the journal. Journal of Astrophysics. In an attached article, Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society LettersScientists have put forward the first hypotheses about the type of galaxy it could be.

The team of astronomers, including researchers from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics and the Smithsonian, propose two ideas: HD1 makes stars contains an astonishing proportion of even the first, never observed Population III stars in the universe; or that it contains a supermassive black hole with a mass a hundred million times that of our Sun.

“Answer the questions about the nature of a galaxy “It can be a challenge when you’re so far away,” says Fabio Pacucci, lead author of the study and an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics.

“It’s like guessing the nationality from a flag where a ship is flying far on land, in the midst of a storm and in thick fog. Maybe some colors and shapes of the flag can be seen, but not all.. It’s a long analysis game and the exclusion of illogical scenarios,” he warns.

For now the HD1 is known to be extremely bright in ultraviolet light, which means “some energetic processes it’s happening there. Or better yet, they formed several billion years ago,” says Pacucci.

star formation

At first, researchers assumed HD1 was a standard, highly star-forming galaxy. Again, After doing the calculations, The astronomer found that HD1 is producing them “with an incredible rate” of more than a hundred times a year, a figure “at least 10 times higher than we would expect for these galaxies.”

That’s when the team began to suspect that HD1 wasn’t making ordinary stars.

“The first population of stars to form in the universe was larger, brighter, and hotter than modern stars,” says Pacucci.

“Assuming that the stars produced in HD1 are these early or Population III stars, their properties can be more easily explained. In fact, the stars’ Population III can produce more ultraviolet light than normal stars. This can brighten HD1’s extreme ultraviolet brightness,” he explains.

However, another possible explanation for HD1’s extreme brightness could be the existence of a supermassive black hole. The region surrounding the black hole can swallow large amounts of gas, emitting high-energy photons.

If so, it would be the oldest supermassive black hole known to humanity. closest to the big bang more than anyone who currently holds this record.

As Avi Loeb, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics and co-author of the study, explains, “HD1 would have represented a giant baby in the delivery chamber of the early universe.”

But in addition to this, “by creating some hundreds of millions of years after the Big BangA black hole in HD1 must have grown from a gigantic seed with unprecedented speed. Once again, nature seems more creative than we are,” Loeb concludes.

1200 hours of observation

HD1 was later discovered 1200 hours of observation With the Subaru telescopes, VISTA, the UK Infrared Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

“Finding the HD1 was a very difficult task. 700,000 objects«, says Yuichi Wonderne, an astronomer at the University of Tokyo and author of the discovery.

“HD1’s red color matched the expected properties of a galaxy surprisingly well. 13.5 billion light years. I got goosebumps when I found this,” she admits.

The team then made follow-up observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to confirm the distance. The galaxy is 100 million light-years away from GN-z11, the current record holder for the farthest galaxy.

together now James Webb Space Telescope, The team will once again observe HD1 to confirm its distance from Earth. If current calculations are correct, HD1 would be the most distant and oldest galaxy ever found.

These observations will allow us to learn more about HD1 and confirm which of its theories is correct.