HD1: Most Distant Galaxy Ever Seen

April 9, 2022

A galaxy named HD1 might be the most distant object that has ever been spotted by astronomers. The brightness of this galaxy might be due to an enormous black hole that is at its centre or due to the creation of large primordial stars.

Overview:

The galaxy HD1 was discovered by Fabio Pacucci along with his colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts.
They sifted through huge amounts of public data sets from various powerful telescopes that are available.
After sifting through the data, they again observed HD1 with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) located in Chile.

What do these observations show?

Those observations have shown that the newly discovered galaxy is around 33.4 billion light-years away, and over a billion light-years further than the previously discovered most distant object, a galaxy called GN-z11. The age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years as the universe is constantly expanding whereas the distance of this galaxy is much further. This newly discovered galaxy is extraordinarily bright in terms of ultraviolet wavelengths, which means that whatever is producing the is extremely hot.

Reasons for the brightness of this galaxy

There are two ways to make it shine so brightly which are either it is undergoing a star formation that is much bigger compared to the galaxy’s relatively small size or there is an active supermassive black hole located in this galaxy.

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