GN-z11 tagged posts

Astronomers Detect Oldest Black Hole ever observed

The GN-z11 galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope

Researchers have discovered the oldest black hole ever observed, dating from the dawn of the universe, and found that it is ‘eating’ its host galaxy to death.

The international team, led by the University of Cambridge, used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect the black hole, which dates from 400 million years after the big bang, more than 13 billion years ago. The results, which lead author Professor Roberto Maiolino says are “a giant leap forward,” are reported in the journal Nature.

That this surprisingly massive black hole — a few million times the mass of our Sun — even exists so early in the universe challenges our assumptions about how black holes form and grow...

Read More

Astronomers have Spotted the Farthest Galaxy ever

Harikane et al.

An international team of astronomers, including researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, has spotted the most distant astronomical object ever: a galaxy.

Named HD1, the galaxy candidate is some 13.5 billion light-years away and is described Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal. In an accompanying paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters, scientists have begun to speculate exactly what the galaxy is.

The team proposes two ideas: HD1 may be forming stars at an astounding rate and is possibly even home to Population III stars, the universe’s very first stars — which, until now, have never been observed...

Read More

The Farthest Galaxy in the universe

A starfield
Far far away. Due to the expansion of the universe, even though the galaxy GN-z11 is 13.4 billion years old, the light from it has travelled 32 billion light years to reach us. Image: Pixabay CC-0

Chemical Signatures give away the distance to the most distant galaxy

A team of astronomers used the Keck I telescope to measure the distance to an ancient galaxy. They deduced the target galaxy GN-z11 is not only the oldest galaxy but also the most distant. It’s so distant it defines the very boundary of the observable universe itself. The team hopes this study can shed light on a period of cosmological history when the universe was only a few hundred million years old.

We’ve all asked ourselves the big questions at times: “How big is the universe?” or “How and when did galaxies form?”...

Read More

Hubble Breaks Cosmic Distance Record: Sees Universe soon after Big Bang

This image shows the position of the most distant galaxy discovered so far within a deep sky Hubble Space Telescope survey called GOODS North (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North). The survey field contains tens of thousands of galaxies stretching far back into time. The remote galaxy GN-z11, shown in the inset, existed only 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 3 percent of its current age. It belongs to the first generation of galaxies in the Universe and its discovery provides new insights into the very early Universe. This is the first time that the distance of an object so far away has been measured from its spectrum, which makes the measurement extremely reliable. GN-z11 is actually ablaze with bright, young, blue stars but these look red in this image because its light was stretched to longer, redder, wavelengths by the expansion of the Universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Oesch (Yale University)

This image shows the position of the most distant galaxy discovered so far within a deep sky Hubble Space Telescope survey called GOODS North (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North). The survey field contains tens of thousands of galaxies stretching far back into time. The remote galaxy GN-z11, shown in the inset, existed only 400 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 3 percent of its current age. It belongs to the first generation of galaxies in the Universe and its discovery provides new insights into the very early Universe. This is the first time that the distance of an object so far away has been measured from its spectrum, which makes the measurement extremely reliable...

Read More