By Ron Cowen
Quick, Marge, call the Cosmic Enquirer! Astronomers have discovered a monster blob lurking at the edge of the universe. The blob may be the earliest known galaxy to be caught in the act of its first feeding frenzy.
The giant parcel of gas and stars stretches for 55,000 light-years, a little more than half the diameter of the Milky Way’s disk today. Yet this newfound object hails from a time when the universe was only 6 percent its current age.
Masami Ouchi of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, Calif., and his colleagues first recorded light from the blob, along with 206 other remote galaxy candidates, with the infrared Subaru Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. Spectra taken at the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea and at the Magellan Telescope near La Serena, Chile, confirmed that the blob resides 12.9 billion light-years from Earth, making it the fourth most distant object known in the cosmos. Because peering deep into space is the same as looking far back in time, the body’s distance reveals that it dates from just 800 million years after the Big Bang.