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Astronomers have been jumping past each other lately. Last week, a group using the Hubble Space Telescope announced they had discovered what it could be. The most distant and oldest star ever seenNicknamed Earendel, which shone 12.9 billion years ago, just 900 million years after the Big Bang.

Now, another international group of astronomers say they’ve pushed the limits of the largest telescopes on Earth to discover what appears to be the oldest and most distant collection of starlight ever seen: a reddish blob, helpfully named HD1, scattering an enormous amount of light. Energy just 330 million years after the Big Bang. This time domain is still unexplored. Another blob, HD2 looks almost the same distance away.

While astronomers await their chance to observe them with the new James Webb Space Telescope, they can only guess what these blobs are — galaxies or quasars or perhaps something else entirely. But astronomers say they can shed light on a crucial stage in which whatever they are, the cosmos evolves from the pristine primordial fire to planets, life, and us.

“As a kid, I’m excited to see the first fireworks in an amazing and highly anticipated show,” said Fabio Pacucci of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “This may be one of the first flashes of light to illuminate the cosmos in more than 13 billion years in a spectacle that ultimately created every star, planet, and even flower we see around us today.”

Dr. Pacucci was part of a team led by Yuichi Wonderne of the University of Tokyo, who spent 1,200 hours using various ground-based telescopes to search for very early galaxies. Their findings were published on Thursday. Astrophysical Journal and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. their job too Published in Sky & Telescope magazine at the beginning of the year.

In the expanding universe, the further an object is from us, the faster it is moving away from us. When the sound of a moving ambulance siren changes to a lower tone, this movement causes an object’s light to shift to longer red wavelengths. To search for the most distant galaxies, astronomers sifted through about 70,000 objects, and HD1 was the reddest they could find.

In a statement released by the Center for Astrophysics, Dr. “HD1’s red color matches the expected characteristics of a galaxy 13.5 billion light-years away surprisingly well, and I got a little goosebumps when I found it,” said Wonderne.

However, the gold standard for cosmic distances is redshift, which is obtained by obtaining a spectrum of the object and measuring how much the wavelengths emitted by the characteristic elements increase or redshift. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA (a collection of radio telescopes in Chile), Dr. Wonderane and her team achieved a temporary redshift of 13 for HD1, meaning that the wavelength of light emitted by an oxygen atom is extended. 14 times wavelength is at rest. The redshift of the other block was not determined.

A galaxy presumed to be just 330 million years after time began, which could also confirm the redshift measurement at the Webb telescope’s hunting grounds.

“If the redshift from ALMA can be confirmed, it would be a truly spectacular object,” he said. Marcia Rieke D., of the University of Arizona, principal investigator of the Webb telescope.

According to the story astronomers tell, the path to the universe as we know it began about 100 million years after the Big Bang, when the hydrogen and helium created in the primordial explosion began to condense in the first stars known as Population 3 stars (Populations). 1 and 2, which have large amounts of heavier elements, are present in galaxies today). Consisting only of hydrogen and helium, such stars had never been observed and would be much larger and brighter than stars in the universe today. They would burn hot and die quickly in supernova explosions, which would hastened chemical evolution which then polluted a pristine universe with elements like oxygen and iron.

Dr. Pacucci said they first thought HD1 and HD2 were starburst galaxies brimming with new stars. But after further investigation, they discovered that HD1 was producing stars 10 times faster than such galaxies usually do.

Dr. Another possibility, Pacucci said, is that this galaxy is giving birth to that first ultra-bright Population 3 star. Another explanation is that all this glow comes from material bouncing into a supermassive black hole 100 million times the mass of the sun. But astronomers have trouble explaining how a black hole grew so early in cosmic time.

Was he born this way – in the chaos of the Big Bang – or was he just utterly hungry?

Dr. “HD1 would represent a giant baby in the delivery room of the early universe,” said Avi Loeb, co-author of Pacucci’s paper.