Scientists Have Spotted the Farthest Galaxy Ever – It May Be Home to the Oldest Stars in the Universe

Shining only ~300 million years after the Big Bang, it may be home to the oldest stars in the universe, or a supermassive black hole.

A group of astronomers from across the world, including those from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, has discovered the most distant astronomical object ever: a galaxy. The galaxy candidate, known as HD1, is 13.5 billion light-years distant and was first detailed in The Astrophysical Journal on April 7, 2022. A supermassive black hole 100 million times the mass of our Sun might exist inside the galaxy. HD1 will be the most distant — and oldest — galaxy ever discovered, if current estimations are true. It is 100 million light-years away from the current world record holder, GN-z11. Scientists have begun to hypothesize about what the galaxy is in an accompanying piece published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

The group has two ideas: HD1 might be creating stars at an incredible pace, and it could even be home to Population III stars, the universe’s earliest stars, which have never been seen before. HD1 might also be home to a supermassive black hole with a mass 100 million times that of our Sun.

“Answering questions about the nature of a source so far away can be challenging,” says Fabio Pacucci, principal author of the MNRAS investigation, co-author of the ApJ discovery paper, and astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. “It’s like guessing the nationality of a ship from the flag it flies, while being faraway ashore, with the vessel in the middle of a gale and dense fog. One can maybe see some colors and shapes of the flag, but not in their entirety. It’s ultimately a long game of analysis and exclusion of implausible scenarios.”

In ultraviolet light, HD1 is exceptionally bright. To explain this, Pacucci claims that “some energetic processes are occurring there or, better yet, did occur some billions of years ago.”

Starburst Galaxy or Population III Stars?

Initially, the researchers thought HD1 was a typical starburst galaxy, one that generates stars at a rapid pace. But after calculating how many stars HD1 was producing, they obtained “an incredible rate — HD1 would be forming more than 100 stars every single year. This is at least 10 times higher than what we expect for these galaxies.”

That’s when the team began suspecting that HD1 might not be forming normal, everyday stars.

“The very first population of stars that formed in the universe were more massive, more luminous and hotter than modern stars,” Pacucci says. “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.”

A supermassive black hole, however, could also explain the extreme luminosity of HD1. As it gobbles down enormous amounts of gas, high energy photons may be emitted by the region around the black hole.

If that’s the case, it would be by far the earliest supermassive black hole known to humankind, observed much closer in time to the Big Bang compared to the current record-holder.

Breaking the Record for Quasars and Black Holes

“HD1 would represent a giant baby in the delivery room of the early universe,” says Avi Loeb an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics and co-author on the MNRAS study. “It breaks the highest quasar redshift on record by almost a factor of two, a remarkable feat.”

HD1 was discovered after more than 1,200 hours of observing time with the Subaru Telescope, VISTA Telescope, UK Infrared Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope.

“It was very hard work to find HD1 out of more than 700,000 objects,” says Yuichi Harikane, an astronomer at the University of Tokyo who discovered the galaxy. “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.”

The team then conducted follow-up observations using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to confirm the distance, which is 100 million light-years further than GN-z11, the current record-holder for the furthest galaxy.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, the research team will soon once again observe HD1 to verify its distance from Earth. If current calculations prove correct, HD1 will be the most distant — and oldest — galaxy ever recorded.

The same observations will allow the team to dig deeper into HD1’s identity and confirm if one of their theories is correct.

“Forming a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, a black hole in HD1 must have grown out of a massive seed at an unprecedented rate,” Loeb says. “Once again, nature appears to be more imaginative than we are.”

References:

“A Search for H-Dropout Lyman Break Galaxies at z~12-16” by Yuichi Harikane, Akio K. Inoue, Ken Mawatari, Takuya Hashimoto, Satoshi Yamanaka, Yoshinobu Fudamoto, Hiroshi Matsuo, Yoichi Tamura, Pratika Dayal, L. Y. Aaron Yung, Anne Hutter, Fabio Pacucci, Yuma Sugahara and Anton M. Koekemoer, 8 April 2022, The Astrophysical Journal.
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac53a9
arXiv:2112.09141

“Are the Newly-Discovered z∼13 Drop-out Sources Starburst Galaxies or Quasars?” by Fabio Pacucci, Pratika Dayal, Yuichi Harikane, Akio K. Inoue and Abraham Loeb, 7 April 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.
DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slac035
arXiv:2201.00823

About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask—and ultimately answer—humanity’s greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.

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