An international team of astrophysicists and astronomers has identified mysterious and incredibly bright objects in the distant universe.
Scientists confirm that these luminous red objects existed in the early universe, and that they cannot be explained by our understanding of how galaxies and black holes are born.
Scientists have discovered three of these mysterious objects, whose brightness reached us when the universe was only 600-800 million years old, or about 5% of its current age.
These objects appear to be filled with ancient stars and surprisingly massive black holes, none of which were thought to have been able to form at such an early stage in the universe.
Scientists came to this discovery after searching for the intensity of different wavelengths of light.
They look like very old stars, hundreds of millions of years old, but that would not be expected so early in the evolution of the universe.
They also found evidence of massive black holes in the same objects, suggesting they could be up to 1,000 times more massive than the supermassive black hole in our own Milky Way galaxy.
Such objects should not be observed according to the current understanding of galaxy growth and black hole formation. It is thought that these objects would take billions of years to grow together.
“We confirmed that these appear to be full of ancient stars, hundreds of millions of years old, in a universe that is only 600 to 800 million years old,” said Benjie Wang of Pennsylvania State University, lead author of the study. “Remarkably, these objects hold the record for the oldest signatures of ancient starlight.”
“It was completely unexpected to find such ancient stars in such a young universe,” he continued. “The standard models of cosmology and galaxy formation have been incredibly successful, yet these luminous objects do not fit comfortably into those theories.
Scientists first discovered the objects about two years ago, in July 2022. Some time later, they published a research paper in the journal Nature confirming their existence.
They then thought the objects were galaxies, but further research provided more details about the light emitted from them, showing how far away they were and where this bright light might be coming from.
But these additional details raise more questions. Scientists have never seen such objects before and have no idea how they came to be.
Scientists hope to better understand the objects with more observations. This could help explain what parts of the light come from the stars themselves and what black holes might expel as they devour the surrounding matter.
The space and it's wonders.
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