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Distant galaxy formed stars only 250 million years after the Big Bang

Little is known about the star-birth activity of the earliest galaxies. Observations of a particularly distant galaxy provide evidence for such activity when the Universe was just 2% of its current age.
  1. Rychard Bouwens

    1. Rychard Bouwens is at the Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Leiden NL-2333, the Netherlands.

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Astronomers have only a limited understanding of star and galaxy formation in the first 300 million years of the Universe’s history1,2. Two important processes would have been accretion, whereby objects increase in mass by gravitationally attracting nearby matter, and the cooling of gas. But the overall picture lacks the sensitive observational data required to inform or guide its construction. In a paper in Nature, Hashimoto et al.3 present observations of an extremely distant galaxy, and report that star-birth activity began there just 250 million years after the Big Bang. The authors’ results suggest that future telescopes could detect such early episodes of star formation in similar galaxies.

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Nature 557, 312-313 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05114-z

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