Astronomers Find What Might Be the Most Distant Galaxy Yet

[Zorro]

Is the object a galaxy of primordial stars or a black hole knocking on the door of time? The Webb space telescope may help answer that question.

Astronomers have been leapfrogging each other into the past lately. Last week, a group using the Hubble Space Telescope announced they had discovered what could be the most distant and earliest star ever seen, nicknamed Earendel, which twinkled 12.9 billion years ago, only 900 million years after the Big Bang.

Now another international group of astronomers, pushing the limits of the biggest telescopes on Earth, say they have discovered what appears to be the earliest and most distant collection of starlight ever seen: a reddish blob usefully named HD1, which was pouring out prodigious amounts of energy only 330 million years after the Big Bang. That realm of time is so far unexplored. Another blob, HD2 appears almost as far away.

Astronomers can only guess what these blobs are — galaxies or quasars or maybe something else entirely — while they wait for their chance to observe them with the new James Webb Space Telescope. But whatever they are, astronomers say, they could shed light on a crucial phase in the cosmos as it evolved from pristine primordial fire into planets, life and us.

“I am excited as a kid who spots the very first firework in a magnificent and highly anticipated show,” said Fabio Pacucci of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “This could well be one of the first glimmers of light to illuminate the cosmos in a show that ultimately created every star, planet and even flower that we see around us today — more than 13 billion years later.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/07/science/astronomers-distant-galaxy.html