Mysterious Space Blob Discovered At Cosmic Dawn

At least now I have a name for my existential dread - it's Himiko.

Mysterious Space Blob Discovered At Cosmic Dawn
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090422151828.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2009) — Using information from a suite of
telescopes, astronomers have discovered a mysterious, giant object
that existed at a time when the universe was only about 800 million
years old. Objects such as this one are dubbed extended Lyman-Alpha
blobs; they are huge bodies of gas that may be precursors to galaxies.

This blob was named Himiko for a legendary, mysterious Japanese queen.
It stretches for 55 thousand light years, a record for that early
point in time. That length is comparable to the radius of the Milky
Way's disk.

The researchers are puzzled by the object. Even with superb data from
the world's best telescopes, they are not sure what it is. Because it
is one of the most distant objects ever found, its faintness does not
allow the researchers to understand its physical origins. It could 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. Because this mysterious
and remarkable object was discovered early in the history of the
universe in a Japanese Subaru field, the researchers named the object
after the legendary mysterious queen in ancient Japan.

"The farther out we look into space, the farther we go back in time, "
explained lead author Masami Ouchi, a fellow at the Observatories of
the Carnegie Institution who led an international team of astronomers
from the U.S., Japan, and the United Kingdom. "I am very surprised by
this discovery. I have never imagined that such a large object could
exist at this early stage of the universe's history. According to the
concordance model of Big Bang cosmology, small objects form first and
then merge to produce larger systems. This blob had a size of typical
present-day galaxies when the age of the universe was about 800
million years old, only 6% of the age of today's universe!"

Extended blobs discovered thus far have mostly been seen at a distance
when the universe was 2 to 3 billion years old. No extended blobs have
previously been found when the universe was younger. Himiko is located
at a transition point in the evolution of the universe called the
reionization epoch—it's as far back as we can see to date. And at 55
thousand light years, Himiko is a big blob for that time.

This reionizing chapter in the universe was at the cosmic dawn, the
epoch between about 200 million and one billion years after the Big
Bang. During this period, neutral hydrogen began to form quasars,
stars, and the first galaxies. Astronomers probe this era by searching
for characteristic hydrogen signatures from the scattering of photons
created by ionized gas clouds.

The team initially identified Himiko among 207 distant galaxy
candidates seen at optical wavelengths using the Subaru telescope from
the Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey Field located in the constellation
of Cetus. They then made spectroscopic observations to measure the
distance with the Keck/DEIMOS and Carnegie's Magellan/IMACS
instrumentation. Himiko was an extraordinarily bright and large
candidate for a distant galaxy. "We hesitated to spend our precious
telescope time by taking spectra of this weird candidate. We never
believed that this bright and large source was a real distant object.
We thought it was a foreground interloper contaminating our galaxy
sample," continued Ouchi. "But we tried anyway. Then, the spectra
exhibited a characteristic hydrogen signature clearly indicating a
remarkably large distance—12.9 billion light years!"

"Using infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the
United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, radio data from the VLA, and X-ray
imaging from the XMM-Newton satellite, we were able to estimate the
star-formation rate and stellar mass of this galaxy and to investigate
whether it contains an active nucleus powered by a super-massive black
hole," remarked James Dunlop a team member at Edinburgh. "We found
that the stellar mass of Himiko is an order of magnitude larger than
other objects known at a similar epoch, but we cannot as yet tell if
the center houses an active and growing black hole."

"One of the puzzling things about Himiko is that it is so
exceptional," said Carnegie's Alan Dressler, a member of the team. "If
this was the discovery of a class of objects that are ancestors of
today's galaxies, there should be many more smaller ones already found—
a continuous distribution. Because this object is, to this point, one-
of-a-kind, it makes it very hard to fit it into the prevailing model
of how normal galaxies were assembled. On the other hand, that's what
makes it interesting!"

The research is published in the May 10, 2009, issue of The
Astrophysical Journal. The work was funded by the NASA through an
award issued by JPL/Caltech, the Department of Energy, and the
Carnegie Institution. The research is based in part on data collected
at Subaru Telescope, which is operated by the National Astronomical
Observatory of Japan; the W.M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as
a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology,
the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA); the Spitzer Telescope, managed by JPL for NASA;
the Magellan telescopes operated by a consortium consisting of the
Carnegie Institution, Harvard University, MIT, the University of
Michigan, and the University of Arizona; and the United Kingdom
Infrared Telescope, which is operated by the Joint Astronomy Centre on
behalf of the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the UK.

------------------

namaste;
bodhi
.

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