CANADA: Astronomers using a giant radio telescope in the Atacama Desert of Chile have sighted the star-forming hotspot in a lopsided galaxy that was still growing when the universe was just 800 million years old.
The findings, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, shed light on a time in the history of the cosmos that has been shrouded in mystery.
The formation of the earliest galaxies is somewhat hidden from view because the early universe was full of a soup of neutral hydrogen gas that absorbed the ultraviolet light being emitted by these young stars. But that stellar radiation also helped to slowly clear away the haze by ionizing it, a process that started only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was born, and lasted until around the billion-year mark. This period is known as the epoch of reionization. Back then, the universe was still a kid; today it’s roughly 13.8 billion years old.
Scientists want to look back in time and understand this epoch in the universe’s history, because learning how these early galaxies formed could shed light on the evolution of the cosmos. They do this by using very powerful telescopes.
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