[Epoch Times, July 06, 2022]Scientists have observed a galaxy that was born only 450 million years after the Big Bang and found that it already has the characteristic of rotation.
The current mainstream astronomical theory believes that our universe was born after a big bang nearly 14 billion years ago, and then continued to expand and grow, and various celestial bodies that people see today have evolved in it. The galaxy observed by the new study was born when the universe was only 4% of its current age.
Scientists previously believed that with the characteristics of disk-like shape and rotation, galaxies have evolved to a more mature form in the later period, and were formed during the long process of cosmic evolution. There is no clear theory and evidence for how long it will take for such a mature form to evolve after the Big Bang. However, the latest discovery came as a surprise to scientists.
Sarah Bosman of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, a colleague who was not involved in the study, told the Science magazine website that the discovery means that early “It’s a little surprising” that ‘s stars have converged into spinning disk galaxies, and while this doesn’t violate existing theories, it does extend existing knowledge.
Scientists made the discovery from the “redshift” property of starlight. The redshift of light is similar to the Doppler effect, where the wavelength of light from an object appears to grow longer as it moves away from the observer. In the visible spectrum, the violet end has a shorter wavelength and the red end has a longer wavelength, so the phenomenon that the wavelength of light becomes longer is called redshift. Therefore, according to the degree of redshift of the starlight reaching the earth, scientists infer a number of data such as the distance of these celestial bodies from the earth, their age, and the expansion rate of the universe.
As the resolution of the observations improved, in this study, the researchers were also able to discern the difference in redshift between stars within the galaxy, and even to determine which stars were moving in the direction of the Earth observer and which were moving in the direction of the Earth observer. moving away from the Earth.
Combining data on the motion of stars in this galaxy, the team revealed in a report published July 1 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that galaxy MACS1149-JD1 (JD1 for short) is moving at about 50 per second. Rotating at the speed of kilometers.
For comparison, the Milky Way rotates at about 220 kilometers per second. The study also found that the JD1 galaxy is only about 3,000 light-years in diameter, much smaller than the Milky Way. The diameter of the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years.
JD1 is not the most distant galaxy that scientists have ever observed, but it is the earliest galaxy with a rotating property ever discovered. ◇#
Responsible editor: Ye Ziwei
