Long Ago and Far Away, an Average Galaxy | UC Davis
https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/long-ago-and-far-away-average-galaxy
Astronomers led by a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, have discovered
one of the most distant galaxies in the universe, and it’s nothing out of the ordinary.
“Other most distant objects are extremely bright and probably rare compared to other galaxies,” said Austin Hoag, a UC Davis graduate student in physics
who is lead author on the paper, published April 10 in Nature Astronomy. “We think this is much more representative of galaxies of the time.”
These ultradistant galaxies, seen as they were close to the beginning of the universe, are interesting to Hoag, UC Davis physics professor Marusa Bradac,
and collaborators in the U.S., Australia and Europe because they fall within the “Epoch of Reionization,” a period about a billion years after the Big
Bang when the universe became transparent.
After the Big Bang, the universe was a cloud of cold, atomic hydrogen, which blocks light. The first stars and galaxies condensed out of the cloud and
started to emit light and ionizing radiation. This radiation melted away the atomic hydrogen like a hot sun clearing fog, and the first galaxies spread
their light through the universe.
Much remains lost in the fog of reionization.
