Question: How big and old is the Himiko Cloud??
Answer: Spotted from 12.9 billion light-years away, Himiko Cloud dates to a time when the universe was just 800 million years old.
At 55,000 light years across, the giant gas cloud spans about half the diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy. Himiko holds more than 10 times as much mass as the next largest object found in the early universe, or roughly the equivalent mass of 40 billion suns.
See also: 10 Astronomy Facts: Remarkable, Fascinating And Puzzling
Himiko may represent an ionized gas halo surrounding a super-massive black hole, or a cooling gas cloud that indicates a primordial galaxy. It might also be the result of a collision between two young galaxies, or the outgoing wind of a highly active star nursery, or a single giant galaxy.
The cloud predates similar blobs, known as Lyman-Alpha blobs, which existed when the universe was 2 billion to 3 billion years old. Researchers named their new find Himiko, after an ancient legendary Japanese queen of the kingdom of Yamataikoku, Japan, during the third century C.E.
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Image credit: NASA, ESA, The University of Tokyo (M. Ouchi)