William Atkins
Thursday, 23 April 2009 19:40
Science -
Space
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They followed up this survey with observations from the
Keck/DEIMOS and
Magellan/IMACS arrays. These instruments identified ionized hydrogen gas within the light (radiation) that was emitted from Himiko and impinged on the telescopes 12.9 billion years later.
An image, taken by the Ouchi team, of the Himiko blog, the most massive object discovered so far in the early Universe, is found within the Carnegie Institution for Science web page called “
Himiko.”
Dr. Ouchi stated,
"I have never heard about any [similar] objects that could be resolved at this distance. It's kind of record-breaking." [Space.com]
Astronomers have already discovered similar blobs, called Lyman-Alpha blobs, which were formed two to three billion years after the Big Bang explosion. However, this blob formed much earlier than these LABs, which makes it very special to astronomers.
The Himiko is about ten times more massive than the largest of these Lyman-Alpha blobs. The mass of Himiko is equivalent to the mass of about 40 billion stars about the same size as our Sun.
Himiko is also about 55,000 light-years across (that is, it takes light (radiation) about 55,000 light-years to across it). Compared to our Milky Way Galaxy, it is about one-half its diameter.
The time that Himiko formed is called by cosmologists as the Reionization Epoch because hot, energetic hydrogen gas was just beginning to come together to form stars, and then galaxies, which created radiation (light) that astronomers now are also to observe through their huge light-gathering telescopes. The reionization epoch lasted from 0.2 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang explosion.
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