GN-Z11, a young but moderately large galaxy located in the constellation Ursa Major, is estimated to date to when the universe was only 420 million years old, or 3% of its current age.
This image shows GN-Z11, a bright star-forming galaxy at Z = 10.957. Image Credit: NASA / ESA / P. Osh, Yale University / G. Bramer, STSCI / P. Van Dokkam, Yale University / G. Islingworth, University of California, Santa Cruz.
Astronomer, co-lead author of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo and Optical, Dr. And the Department of Infrared Astronomy at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
“But measuring and testing such a distance is not an easy task.”
In his new study Dr. Kas. Kashikawa and his colleagues arrested G.N.
“Some chemical signatures, called emission lines, print different patterns in the light of distant objects,” he explained.
“By measuring how extended these so-called signatures are, we can estimate how far the light would have traveled to cut, thus giving the target a distance from the galaxy.”
“We paid particular attention to ultraviolet light, as it is an area of the electromagnetic spectrum that we expect to find red-red chemical signatures.” Dr. Kashikawa added.
“NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope often finds signatures in the spectrum of GN-Z11.”
“However, even Hubble will not be able to solve the ultraviolet emission lines to our required degree.”
Using near-infrared spectroscopic observations of the Mosphere spectrograph on the Cake Eye Telescope at the WM Cake Observatory in Hawaii, the researchers used GN.
“The mesosphere captured the emission lines of the emission from the GN-Z11, which allowed us to make better predictions on its distance than possible from previous data,” they said.
The results were published in the journal Nature astronomy.
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El Jiang Et al. Evidence for GN-Z11 as a bright galaxy at Redsheft 10.957. Nat Astron, December 14, 2020 Published online; doi: 10.1038 / s41550-020-01275-y
