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Experts Puzzled by Strange Space Blob
By Jeremy Hsu, Space.comSpace.com
(April 22) -- A newly found primordial blob may represent the most massive object ever discovered in the early universe, researchers announced Wednesday.
The gas cloud, spotted from 12.9 billion light-years away, could signal the earliest stages of galaxy formation back when the universe was just 800 million years old.This is a composite, false-color image of the biggest known object in the early universe -- a gas blob with a mass equal to that of 40 billion suns. The object is 12.9 billion light-years away (the bar at lower right represents 10,000 light-years). The blob could be a relic of the earliest stages of galaxy formation. Scientists named it Himiko, after an ancient Japanese queen.
"I have never heard about any [similar] objects that could be resolved at this distance," said Masami Ouchi, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution in Pasadena, Calif. "It's kind of record-breaking."
A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles. An object 12.9 billion light-years away is seen as it existed 12.9 billion years ago, and the light is just now arriving.
The cloud predates similar blobs, known as Lyman-Alpha blobs, which existed when the universe was 2 billion to 3 billion years old. Researchers named their new find Himiko, after an ancient Japanese queen with an equally murky past.
Himiko holds more than 10 times as much mass as the next largest object found in the early universe, or roughly the equivalent mass of 40 billion suns. At 55,000 light years across, it spans about half the diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy.
Lyman-Alpha blobs remain a mystery because existing telescopes have a hard time peering so far back to nearly the dawn of the universe.
Himiko sits right on the doorstep of an era called the reionization epoch, which lasted between 200 million and 1 billion years after the Big Bang. That's when the universe had just emerged from its cosmic dark ages and had begun brightening through the formation of stars and galaxies. Hot, energized hydrogen gas from that time period has allowed astronomers to begin seeing some objects  as much good as it does to squint at such fuzzy blobs.
"Even for astronomers, we don't understand," Ouchi told SPACE.com. "We are keen to try to understand what those systems are in the reionization epoch."
Himiko may represent an ionized gas halo surrounding a super-massive black hole, or a cooling gas cloud that indicates a primordial galaxy, Ouchi noted. But it might also be the result of a collision between two young galaxies, or the outgoing wind of a highly active star nursery, or a single giant galaxy.
Full Article Here (includes excited plixelated photos)
I'm sure they'll figure out a way how that thing is going to kill us, and the movie will probably star Bruce Willis.
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