Astronomers spot some of the earliest stars

摘要

A measly 250 million years after the Big Bang, what may be some of the first stars in the universe began to twinkle. Researchers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observatory in Chile to spot starlight emitted in galaxy MACS1149-JD1 (shown in the boxes above). At a distance of 13.28 billion light-years away, the galaxy is one of the farthest-known light sources visible from Earth. The emissions are a clue to the galaxy's redshift - a stretching of light that signifies the speed at which an object is moving away from an observer. Redshifts are clues to a celestial object's distance and age.