|
Thursday April 23, 2009
|
 Astronomers have discovered a primordial "mystery blob," dubbed Himiko, that could be one of the oldest objects ever observed--12.9 billion years old, to be exact. That would place the gas cloud roughly 800 million years after the dawn of the universe, and signal the earliest stages of galaxy formation, according to Space.com.
"I have never heard about any [similar] objects that could be resolved at this distance," said Masami Ouchi, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution in Pasadena, Calif., in the article. "It's kind of record-breaking."
The report said that Himiko holds more than 10 times as much mass as
the next largest object found in the early universe. They estimate that
its mass is approximately the same as 40 billion suns, while it spans
55,000 light-years across (about half the size of our entire Milky Way
Galaxy). It could be either a gaseous halo around a super-massive black
hole, or a cooling gas cloud from an early galaxy, the report said.
Astronomers picked up the blob in 2007 as part of the Subaru/XMM-Newton
Deep Survey Field, and then later confirmed it with spectrographic
instruments from the Keck/DEIMOS and Magellan/IMACS arrays. Seeing this
far back in the past presents a very tough challenge even for the most
advanced astronomical instruments available today. (Image credit: Masami Ouchi)
|
|
|
Mixx It
Digg It
Stumble
More...
April 23, 2009 7:19 PM
Oh now THAT is cool.
One of the things I learned when studying astronomy in college was how far back in time we could - if we had the right tools - look if we just look up into the sky. It's really heartening to see that we're developing those tools!