Buzz
A century ago, it was believed that our galaxy was all there was in the universe. Now, more than 13 billion light-years away, we are observing phenomena from the very dawn of time.
These 10 discoveries come from the farthest reaches of existence, offering us a glimpse of just how vibrant and extraordinary the early universe truly was.
10. A Galaxy From The Dawn Of Time
The cherished Hubble Telescope captured an image from the universe's infancy, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. It revealed the bright young galaxy GN-z11 as it appeared a staggering 13.4 billion years ago.
At this point, the universe was only 3 percent of its current age, with only a few hundred million years passing since the first stars ignited.
GN-z11 likely evolved into a massive galaxy, but at this early stage, it contained only 1 percent of the Milky Way’s star mass and was 25 times smaller than our galaxy.
9. Colliding Starburst Galaxies
Superluminous starburst galaxies dazzle with the formation of countless massive blue stars. These are rare, but astronomers have just discovered two of them colliding near the Big Bang, 12.7 billion years ago.
This swirling, bi-galactic system, called ADFS-27, is located about 12.8 billion light-years away. Each galaxy in this pair is twelve times larger than the 100,000 light-year-wide Milky Way.
Separated by 30,000 light-years, the two galaxies are speeding towards each other at hundreds of kilometers per second, setting the stage for an unprecedented merger.
The resulting elliptical super-galaxy will likely be powerful enough to form an entire galaxy cluster, pulling in hundreds of thousands of other galaxies with its immense gravitational force.
8. The Most Ancient Black Holes
Scientists searching for quasars in the early universe have uncovered a wealth of them, confirming 83 new black holes to add to the 17 previously known from this era.
These black holes are millions to billions of times heavier than our Sun. They were flourishing when the universe was less than 10 percent of its current age, just 800 million years after the Big Bang.
Researchers estimated that if you divided the universe into cubes, each measuring a billion light-years per side, each cube would contain one black hole, or one black hole per 'giga-light-year.'
7. Fat And Dusty Galaxies
The colossal galaxies from the Big Bang era are filled with dust and debris, capable of emitting radiation equal to a trillion Suns. However, they remain hidden because their light is absorbed by all that dust and reemitted at submillimeter wavelengths.
With abundant materials and few objects to consume them, researchers identified a structure that was extraordinarily thick and dusty. This galaxy boasts an enormous gas mass of 330 billion solar masses, whereas the Milky Way has only five billion solar masses due to most of its mass being locked in stars.
6. Whirlpool Galaxies At The Edge Of Space
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is so precise that it has observed 94 percent of the universe, capturing the rotation of two nascent galaxies.
These are among the oldest galaxies known and are five times smaller than the Milky Way, as shown in an ALMA snapshot taken just 800 million years after the Big Bang. Despite the image being nearly 13 billion years old, its color gradients reveal the movement of gas and the galaxies' rotation.
Much like modern galaxies, they rotate like whirlpools, forming thousands of stars every year from the chaos. Researchers are astonished by how swiftly the universe organized itself and spread its resources.
5. The Earliest Black Holes Were Surprisingly Monstrous
A perfectly placed, six-billion-light-year-away galaxy served as a cosmic magnifying glass, bending and intensifying some of the oldest photons in existence.
These photons were emitted by quasar J0439+1634, which, due to the lensing effect, appears 50 times brighter, illuminating the early universe with the combined light of 600 trillion Suns.
The black hole at the heart of the quasar has the mass of 700 million Suns and originates from 12.8 billion years ago. During the Epoch of Reionization, the first light sources broke through the dense hydrogen and helium fog that enveloped the young universe.
4. A 'Fossil Gas Cloud'
The universe is a vast cauldron of chemicals, constantly blending elements. While heavy elements are found everywhere, scientists have discovered a pristine fossil gas cloud, a true relic from the past.
This is only the third relic gas cloud discovered to date, and it managed to stay uncontaminated even 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. It’s also incredibly delicate, a true remnant from the earliest days of the universe.
Like a cosmic 3 Musketeers bar, it contains less than 1/10,000th the heavy elements of the Sun. This suggests it’s a remnant from a time before stars had begun producing heavier elements like metals.
3. A Galaxy Full Of Ancient Stars
Astronomers have recently detected a faint trace of ionized oxygen spread across 13.3 billion light-years of space.
This trace belongs to galaxy MACS1149-JD1, and it appears red due to the stretching of light during an epic journey that began just 500 million years after the Big Bang. The presence of oxygen suggests that MACS1149-JD1’s stars had been shining long enough to produce it.
Not only that, but MACS1149-JD1 already contains a population of mature stars. Astronomers suggest that these stars began shining just 250 million years after the Big Bang, a time close to the birth of the very first stars.
2. A Superbly Bright Quasar
P352-15 holds the title of the brightest radio quasar from the early universe, shining 10 times brighter than anything else. It appears as three orange blobs, which actually represent a galaxy 5,000 light-years wide as it appeared 13 billion years ago. Despite the universe being under a billion years old, P352-15 already hosts a quasar with a supermassive black hole emitting radiation at relativistic speeds.
The massive black hole likely resides in one of the blobs, with the two opposing spots being enormous, deadly jets shooting out from the black hole’s center at nearly the speed of light.
1. A Surprising Revelation About A Star With Two Planets
Astronomers have uncovered a cosmic relic just 375 light-years away. HIP 11952 is a star composed mainly of hydrogen and helium, lacking in metals. Such a star could only have formed during the earliest stages of the universe.
At around 12.8 billion years old, it formed when our Milky Way was still in its infancy. In 2012, scientists were stunned to discover that the star was hosting an even more remarkable find—two ancient planets orbiting it.
There’s ongoing debate about the formation of planets in the early universe, as the scarcity of heavy elements likely hindered their creation. The discovery of HIP 11952 may offer important clues about when planets first became possible in our universe.
Then, the narrative took an unforeseen turn. Armed with the advanced HARPS-N spectrograph at the Galileo National Telescope in Spain, astrophysicists conducted further observations of HIP 11952 over a span of 150 days, from August 2012 to January 2013.
Rather than uncovering two massive planets in the system, the team discovered... nothing. They eventually concluded that the earlier findings of two ancient planets had been mistaken, likely due to errors in the instruments used.
