Himiko blob found: Earliest known beginning of galaxy

William Atkins
Thursday, 23 April 2009 18:40

Science - Space

Dr. Ouchi and other astronomers are trying to understand more about this epoch of time. He states, “Even for astronomers, we don't understand. We are keen to try to understand what those systems are in the reionization epoch."

Space.com states, “Himiko may represent an ionized gas halo surrounding a super-massive black hole, or a cooling gas cloud that indicates a primordial galaxy, Ouchi noted. But it might also be the result of a collision between two young galaxies, or the outgoing wind of a highly active star nursery, or a single giant galaxy.”

They conclude in their abstract, “Although the nature of this object is not yet clearly understood, this could be an important object for studying cooling clouds accreting onto a massive halo, or forming-massive galaxies with significant outflows contributing to cosmic reionization and metal enrichment of intergalactic medium.”

Dr. James Dunlop, one of the team members, stated, “Using infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, radio data from the VLA, and X-ray imaging from the XMM-Newton satellite, we were able to estimate the star-formation rate and stellar mass of this galaxy and to investigate whether it contains an active nucleus powered by a super-massive black hole."

And, "We found that the stellar mass of Himiko is an order of magnitude larger than other objects known at a similar epoch, but we cannot as yet tell if the center houses an active and growing black hole.” [Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS): “Mysterious Space Blob Discovered at Cosmic Dawn”]

Dr. Alan Dressler, another one of the team members, stated, “One of the puzzling things about Himiko is that it is so exceptional. If this was the discovery of a class of objects that are ancestors of today’s galaxies, there should be many more smaller ones already found—a continuous distribution. Because this object is, to this point, one-of-a-kind, it makes it very hard to fit it into the prevailing model of how normal galaxies were assembled."

And, "On the other hand, that’s what makes it interesting!” [CIS]