Unfortunately, scientists weren’t able to figure out how far away it was, which led a few years later to various attempts to measure it, all to no avail.
Now, nearly ten years after the effort began, a research team is reporting in their paper published in the journal Nature that they have finally met with success and have found that starburst galaxy HDF 850.1 is 12.6 billion light years away from us.
The reason the galaxy wasn’t detected by Hubble is because the famous orbiting telescope records ordinary light, which in this case couldn’t reveal the galaxy because it is shrouded in clouds of gas and dust.
But because submillimeter light has longer wavelengths, it can be seen just fine here on Earth when the right technology is used.
When it was first spotted, researchers were surprised by how bright it was, which past experience has shown implies that it must be spawning new stars at an incredible rate.
Subsequent research revealed that the starburst galaxy was producing stars at a rate of 850 per year, a thousand times as many as are formed in our own Milky Way galaxy.
But its distance from us remained a mystery until this new team tried a technique based on the light given off by molecular gases when new stars are formed.
Faraway galaxy distances can be measured using the Dopler shift, the change in the frequency of light waves as an object moves farther away from us, which is what’s happening in space due to the expansion of the universe.
To measure HDF 850.1’s distance, the researchers calculated its “redshift” at 5.2, which allowed them to calculate its distance from us and because it’s over twelve and a half billion miles away, that means the light we see today coming from HDF850.1 was emitted just 1.1 billion years after the moment when the Big Bang is believed to have occurred.
Still a mystery is why the galaxy is forming so many stars, the current theory is that it’s due to two galaxies colliding, thus new research will focus on trying to find out if that is the case with HDF 850.1.
More information: The intense starburst HDF 850.1 in a galaxy overdensity at z ≈ 5.2 in the Hubble Deep Field, Nature 486, 233–236 (14 June 2012) doi:10.1038/nature11073
But because submillimeter light has longer wavelengths, it can be seen just fine here on Earth when the right technology is used.
When it was first spotted, researchers were surprised by how bright it was, which past experience has shown implies that it must be spawning new stars at an incredible rate.
Subsequent research revealed that the starburst galaxy was producing stars at a rate of 850 per year, a thousand times as many as are formed in our own Milky Way galaxy.
But its distance from us remained a mystery until this new team tried a technique based on the light given off by molecular gases when new stars are formed.
Faraway galaxy distances can be measured using the Dopler shift, the change in the frequency of light waves as an object moves farther away from us, which is what’s happening in space due to the expansion of the universe.
To measure HDF 850.1’s distance, the researchers calculated its “redshift” at 5.2, which allowed them to calculate its distance from us and because it’s over twelve and a half billion miles away, that means the light we see today coming from HDF850.1 was emitted just 1.1 billion years after the moment when the Big Bang is believed to have occurred.
Still a mystery is why the galaxy is forming so many stars, the current theory is that it’s due to two galaxies colliding, thus new research will focus on trying to find out if that is the case with HDF 850.1.
More information: The intense starburst HDF 850.1 in a galaxy overdensity at z ≈ 5.2 in the Hubble Deep Field, Nature 486, 233–236 (14 June 2012) doi:10.1038/nature11073
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