An international team of astronomers, led by Portuguese David Sobral, today announced the discovery of the brightest galaxy in the early Universe and the first signs stars when the universe was 800 million years ago.
The galaxy, named after the initials CR7, alluding to the ‘star’ of Portuguese football Cristiano Ronaldo, is a sky area called the Cosmos and is three times brighter than another galaxy from the early days of the universe, the Himiko, the which, according to David Sobral, belonged to the brightness record.
Only in the field of visible light, CR7 gets to be about a trillion (one million one million million) times brighter than Sun stressed Lusa researcher of the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences and the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon.
According to David Sobral, the CR7, detected among several very distant and bright galaxies, can have given “first window” for the first-generation stars that were born when the Universe was giving “the first steps” and mass “hundred to a thousand times” higher than the Sun, and therefore “extremely hot and bright, but with a very short life “in astronomy two million years.
For the astronomer, who also works at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, the discovery opens, in short, way “not only for the first sources of light in the universe, but also to the stars”, that “to form first heavy elements”, such as carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, “when exploded at the end of their lives as supernovae, allowed the existence of life, “including human.
” We detected a light source of incredibly hot stars, never before observed, sources capable of ionizing [separate] completely not only the hydrogen atoms, but also the helium, without a single trace result sign of heavier elements, such as that provided for the first stars, “explained, adding that a first-generation star” can be one to ten million times brighter than the Sun. “.
The investigator explained that the first stars have been formed by hydrogen, helium and small traces of lithium, materials that resulted from the Big Bang, ‘fire firework’ particles that marks the origins of universe, which has nearly 14 billion years.
Another indication that David Sobral found, proving the existence of the first generation of stars, Population III, is that “the area of the galaxy CR7 brighter, and the first stars, was physically separated from the slightly more normal areas, with stars a little more normal, “like the sun.
The brightness of CR7, pointed out, it is visible as people are used to seeing when they look at a star, originating from “extremely young stars and gas being heated and ionized by a source [of radiation] UV [not visible to the eye] absolutely stunning.”
So held the astronomer, the WISE J224607.57-052635.0, presented in May by the US space agency NASA as the brightest galaxy in the universe with light equivalent to more than 300 million million suns, “not is by far the brightest “.
” What’s brilliant WISE these sources, the deep infrared, the dust is heated by a black hole, not the galaxy itself, and this brightness is simply not visible in our eyes, “he advocated considering, therefore, that” is misleading “to compare it to the sun.
David Sobral points until, they may only dust, WISE J224607.57-052635.0 It is not a galaxy.
The discovery of his team, published in the Astrophysical Journal, was made thanks to observations made with ground-based telescopes VLT, WM Keck and Subaru and Hubble space.
Astronomers evaluated an area of the sky where, in the words of Portuguese scientist, “fit about 40 full moons,” and is therefore “ten to 20 times higher than the [area] of the largest studies done before” and ” about 20 thousand times greater than the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, the far field, but small, the majority of investigators to find uses ultra distant galaxies “.
Technically, CR7, arriving being almost 20 times hotter than the surface of the Sun stands for Cosmos (sky area where the galaxy was detected) Redshift (redshift) of 7. The higher the redshift (the spectrum of light) of a galaxy, the more distant it is. In this case, redshift of 7 means that CR7 is 12.9 billion light-years from Earth.
The team of astronomers also part Sérgio Santos, also the Astrophysics Institute and Space Sciences and researchers from the universities of California (USA), Geneva (Switzerland) and Leiden (Netherlands)
Digital Diary with Lusa
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