Second-Oldest Galaxy In The Universe Spotted, Was Formed Almost A Billion Years After Big Bang
Scientists have found what has turned out to be the second-oldest galaxy in the universe, one that was discovered about 12.8 billion light-years away from Earth and may have formed slightly less than a billion years after the Big Bang gave birth to the universe as we know it.
The object’s discovery was published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, and as the scientists noted, the galaxy codenamed G09 83808 is an active, star-forming galaxy that produces about 380 suns’ worth of stars per year. However, it is located so far away from our planet, and with the universe’s continued expansion, it only appears as a faint, stretched light, looking like it did when it was formed about 12.8 billion years ago.
“The Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago and now we are seeing this galaxy from 12.8 billion years ago, so it was forming within the first billion years after the Big Bang,” said lead researcher Min Yun, from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, in a statement quoted by the International Business Times.
Newsweek compared the stretching of the galaxy’s light to the manner in which the siren of an ambulance decreases in pitch as it drives further away. In the context of astronomy, galaxy G09 83808 has the second-largest redshift discovered thus far, with the light’s wavelength especially stretched toward the red section of the spectrum.
The researchers were able to spot the universe’s second-oldest galaxy with the help of the Large Millimeter Telescope, which is found on the summit of an extinct 15,000-foot volcano found in Puebla, Mexico. According to Yun, it was quite the feat to have discovered an object that formed within the universe’s first billion years, as it was still at a point in its young history where it was too hot for anything to be created during the first 400 million years.
“Our best guess is that the first stars and galaxies and black holes all formed within the first half a billion to one billion years,” Yun continued.
“This new object is very close to being one of the first galaxies ever to form.”
Astronomers found a star-forming galaxy 12.8 billion light-years away, one of the universe's oldest known objects https://t.co/m8cgmw2HGC
— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) November 7, 2017
As the universe’s second-oldest galaxy, G09 83808 made for quite an interesting find. But it’s still considerably younger than the oldest galaxy ever spotted. The galaxy codenamed GN-z11 took this honor in March 2016, when scientists used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to spot it about 13.4 billion light-years away from Earth, meaning it formed about 400,000 years after the Big Bang, wrote USA Today.
Like many other galaxies formed several billions of years ago, G09 83808 was spotted through gravitational lensing, a technique wherein large objects with extremely strong gravitational fields magnify smaller, more distant objects and allow astronomers to get a better view of them. For this discovery, Yun and his colleagues saw the universe’s second-oldest galaxy 10 times brighter than it normally should be, as a large galaxy found in between had served as a virtual magnifying glass of sorts.
Meanwhile, there might be a chance that G09 83808 isn’t the second-oldest galaxy after all. This chance, however, is contingent on the Large Millimeter Telescope’s upgrades working out as planned and allowing astronomers to spot even fainter, more distant objects.
[Featured Image by Triff/Shutterstock]
