Astronomers spot farthest galaxy on record; may be home to oldest stars in universe

A team of international astronomers claim to have spotted the most distant galaxy ever in the universe. Named HD1, the galaxy candidate is some 13.5 billion light-years away - that's 100 million light-years further than GN-z11, the current record-holder for the farthest galaxy.

Researchers, including at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, believe that the new galaxy may be home to the oldest stars in the universe, or a supermassive black hole about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The team's findings have been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Initially, the researchers assumed HD1 was a standard starburst galaxy, but then, the team calculated the rate at which the galaxy was producing stars and found that it would be forming more than 100 stars every single year - at least 10 times higher than it is expected for these galaxies.

Alternatively, the team proposes that a supermassive black hole could also explain the extreme luminosity of HD1. If that's the case, it would be by far the earliest supermassive black hole known to humankind, the researchers say.

HD1 would represent a giant baby in the delivery room of the early universe. It breaks the highest quasar redshift on record by almost a factor of two, a remarkable feat.

Avi Loeb an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics and co-author on the MNRAS study.

The galaxy was discovered after 1,200+ hours of observing time with the Subaru Telescope, VISTA Telescope, UK Infrared Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope.

Thereafter, the team, which included researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, conducted follow-up observations using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to confirm the distance.

The team will soon once again observe HD1 using the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space-based observatory to date, to verify the galaxy's distance from Earth. If confirmed, HD1 will be the most distant as well as the oldest galaxy ever recorded.

More information can be found here.