Astronomers Peer Closer Than Ever To 'cosmic Dawn'

Astronomers peer closer than ever to 'cosmic dawn'

Astronomers have observed a galaxy a very distant 13.28 billion lightyears away, zooming in closer than ever to the "cosmic dawn" of the Universe's first stars, they said Wednesday

Paris, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 16th May, 2018 ) :Astronomers have observed a galaxy a very distant 13.28 billion lightyears away, zooming in closer than ever to the "cosmic dawn" of the Universe's first stars, they said Wednesday.

Pinpointing this period of star birth -- which gave rise to oxygen, carbon and other elements in the Universe -- is a holy grail for astronomers chasing down the beginning of everything. Now, thanks to data from the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (ALMA) and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) -- both in Chile -- they are a step closer.

The new details revealed that light from a galaxy dubbed MACS1149-JD1 was 13.28 billion lightyears old, an international team reported in the scientific journal Nature.

This means astronomers were looking at the galaxy just 500 million years after the Big Bang -- when the Universe was about 3.5 percent of its current age.

"It is one of the first galaxies of the Universe," study co-author Nicolas Laporte of University College London (UCL) told AFP. Crucially, some stars in the ancient galaxy were already "mature", implying they had been around much longer -- another 250 million years or so.

"The mature stellar population in MACS1149-JD1 implies that stars were forming back to even earlier times, beyond what we can currently see with our telescopes," said Laporte. "This has very exciting implications for finding 'cosmic dawn' when the first galaxies emerged," he added.

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