Mauna Kea telescopes spy mysterious blob at cosmic dawn

April 23, 2009 - Mauna Kea, Hawaii

This composite image of Himiko, an Alpha-Lyman blob, is shown in false color. Himiko sits nearly 13 billion light years from Earth and spans 55 thousand light years, a record for that early point in time. The thick horizontal bar at the lower right corner presents a size of 10 thousand light years.

Using a number of telescopes, including the Subaru and Keck observatories on the summit of Mauna Kea, scientists have discovered what they describe as a mysterious space blob 13 billion light years from Earth.

Dubbed Lyman-Alpha blobs, these huge bodies of gas are thought to be precursors to galaxies.

Astronomers using the Japanese Subaru telescope were the first to find it, and therefore have named this object Himiko for a legendary Japanese queen. Himiko stretches for 55 thousand light years, a length comparable to the radius of the Milky Way's disk, which is a record for that early point in time.

A press release about the discovery issued by the W.M. Keck Observatory said this Lyman-Alpha blob is one of the most distant objects ever found. Its distance does not easily allow researchers to understand its physical origins. The object could therefore be ionized gas powered by a super-massive black hole, a primordial galaxy with large gas accretion, a collision of two large young galaxies, super wind from intensive star formation or a single giant galaxy with a large mass of about 40 billion Suns.
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