2023-04-30 01:11:17
A view of baby galaxies 13 billion years from Earth, as seen by seven red dots. Provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Scientists have discovered a ‘child galaxy’ born 13 billion years ago. Comparatively smaller than common galaxies, it is believed to be the oldest and most distant collection of stars ever observed. Some of the stars in the baby galaxies have been found to form stars at a rate more than 10 times faster than in much larger galaxies.
According to the New York Times on the 29th (local time), an international joint research team led by Takahiro Morishita, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology, published the results of this research in the international journal ‘Astrophysical Journal Letter’ on the 26th.
How the first galaxies were formed in space has been a mystery to the space astronomy world. The research team started looking for the earliest galaxies in orbit around the sun in December 2021 using the James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared spectrometer (NIRSpec).
A total of seven galaxies were successfully observed by the research team this time. It is estimated that it was born 13 billion years ago, 650 million years after the Big Bang occurred. These galaxies were initially observed as points of red light near the Pandora cluster in the constellation Sculptor, visible from Earth’s southern hemisphere. Spectroscopic analysis confirmed that all seven points are galaxies and are equally distant from Earth.
The size of each galaxy was investigated as 400,000 light-years in diameter (1 light-year is about 9.46 trillion km). It is about one-sixth the distance to the Andremeda Galaxy, the closest galaxy to Earth.
The newly discovered galaxy was found to produce stars more than 10 times faster than galaxies 10 to 100 times larger than this galaxy. Researcher Morishita said, “As a result of calculations, the galaxies discovered this time are expected to grow into giant galaxies with at least 1 trillion stars. The characteristics of galaxies formed in the early universe are much more diverse and complex than we thought.”
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