Back at the break-even point of the Earth, astronauts have found piles of cosmic particles. At least 21 galaxies, forming stars at an alarming rate, come together in the early stages of galaxy browser formation. And it all happens 13 billion light-years away – just 770 million years after the Big Bang itself.
This is the earliest protocluster still discovered, named LAGER-z7OD1, and today it appears to have evolved into a group of 3.7 quadruple galaxies of solar mass.
Such a large, so early protocluster in the Universe – scarce of a cosmic eye since the curtain was built on life, the Universe and all – could include some essential suggestions on how to clean the primordial mist and lights on it, sending light away freely through space.
Our Universe is a truly interconnected place. Galaxies may look somewhat self-contained, but more than half of all galaxies are interconnected in clusters or groups, large structures of hundreds to thousands of galaxies.
It is not known what started these gatherings early in the Universe. Defenders were discovered almost as far as LAGER-z7OD1, some even larger, suggesting that aggregates could start accumulating much faster than previously thought.
But LAGER-z7OD1, according to a team of researchers led by astronaut Weida Hu of China University of Science and Technology, is unique. It can shed light on one of the most mysterious stages in Earth’s history: the Epoch of Reionisation.
“The total volume of the ionized bubbles created by their ball galaxies is found to be relative to the size of the protocluster itself, indicating that we see that the individual bubbles are come together and the intergalactic medium within the protocluster is almost invincible, ”they wrote in their paper.
“LAGER-z7OD1 therefore provides a unique natural laboratory to study the regeneration process.”
A place, you see, has not always been a beautiful, attractive place it is today. For the first 370 million years or so, it was filled with a hot mist of ionic gas. Light could not travel freely through this mist; it scattered free electricity and that was it.
As soon as the Earth cooled down sufficiently, proteins and electrons began to flow into neutral hydrogen atoms. This meant that light – not that there was much, yet – could travel through space in the end.
As the first stars and galaxies began to form, their ultraviolet light replicated the ubiquitous neutral hydrogen throughout the Earth: first in local bubbles around the ultraviolet sources, and then larger areas and more as the ionized bubbles were connected and overflowed, allowing the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation to flow freely.
With about 1 billion years after the Great Bang, the Universe was completely reassessed. This makes it more challenging to study beyond this point (around 12.8 light years away), but it also makes the recycling process itself difficult to understand.
If you prefer, you need very clear objects whose ionizing radiation can cut through the neutral hydrogen, which is what Hu and his team were looking for with the Lyman Alpha Galaxies in an Epoch of Reionization study . These are small early-Earth galaxies that form stars at a gelatinous level, which means that they are found at very great distances, well within the Renaissance. This makes them useful probes of the time.
In their research, the researchers discovered LAGER-z7OD1, a hybrid area of galaxies in a three-dimensional dimension of space measuring 215 million by 98 million by 85 million light-years. In this book two particular sub-protocols merged into one larger one, with at least 21 galaxies, 16 of which were tested.
The total amount of ionized space around the galaxies was slightly larger than the size of LAGER-z7OD1.
“This shows large transitions between individual bubbles, indicating that the individual bubbles are involved in a union or two of large bubbles,” the researchers wrote.
Thus not only does the protocluster represent a good example of its kind, it provides a new data point for studying how these structures shape and appear, but on the formation of early stars in the Universe, it offers a one-of-a-kind window into the creation and combination of ionized bubbles in the middle of the Renaissance.
But the ideas that emerge have not yet been discovered. As the researchers note, it is the work of more powerful telescopes in the future that will be able to observe more detailed details of the recycling process.
The team ‘s research was published in Astronomy of nature.