It measures 55,000 light years across and is nearly 13 billion light years away from Earth. But the most interesting bit about this recently discovered blob of matter is its birth date: Just 800 million years after the Big Bang. Or the presumed Big Bang, anyway — which is the best current theory about the creation of the universe we live in. That’s estimated at about 13.7 billion years ago, give or take a few million years; so it’s a blob from way back at the beginning.
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This image of the Himiko object is a composite and in false color. Credit: M. Ouchi.
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The object was discovered by Japanese researchers at the Subaru telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii and announced recently by the Carnegie Institute for Science. It is what’s known as an extended Lyman-Alpha blob, a mass of gasses that may be an early stage in galaxy formation. And it’s a rather big deal, because it can reveal something about the early composition of the cosmos.
“I am very surprised by this discovery,” lead author Masami Ouchi said in the Carnegie Institute’s announcement. “I have never imagined that such a large object could exist at this early stage of the universe’s history. According to the concordance model of Big Bang cosmology, small objects form first and then merge to produce larger systems. This blob had a size of typical present-day galaxies when the age of the universe was about 800 million years old, only 6% of the age of today’s universe!”
Ouchi, a Fellow at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution, was at the head of a team of Japanese, American and British astronomers who made the discovery.
The object was also given a name by the discovering team: Himiko, a reference to an ancient and possibly mythological shaman queen from third-century Japan.
This is all kinds of fun.