14 DAY TRIAL // In a new report accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, astronomers with the European Southern Observatory announce the discovery of a previously undocumented galaxy.
The galaxy, argued to be the absolute brightest thus far discovered in the young cosmos, was named CR7. If this moniker sounds familiar, this is because it is also the nickname of Cristiano Ronaldo.
That's right, the Portuguese footballer now shares his name with one of the first galaxies to have come into being in the aftermath of the Big Bang. Yet another reason to be jealous of him.
“The nickname was inspired by the great Portuguese footballer, Cristiano Ronaldo, who is known as CR7,” the European Southern Observatory astronomers who found the galaxy write in their report.
Mind you, Cristiano Ronaldo can't take all the credit for naming this galaxy. Au contraire, there's more to the CR7 moniker than just the fact that it's also the nickname of the footballer.
Thus, CR7 stands for COSMOS Redshift 7, with COSMOS being the name of a patch of sky in the constellation Sextans and redshift being a measure of a galaxy's distance to our planet and its age.
“The higher the redshift, the more distant the galaxy and the further back in the history of the Universe it is seen,” scientists explain. With a redshift of 7, CR7 is one of the oldest galaxies.
It wasn't easy zooming in on this galaxy
In their paper announcing the discovery of CR7, European Southern Observatory scientists explain that the galaxy was identified with the help of the Very Large Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert.
As mentioned, CR7 is said to be the brightest cosmic structure of this kind until now discovered in the early universe. More precisely, it is three times brighter than the previous record holder.
The galaxy was imaged by astronomers as it appeared about 800 million years after the Big Bang, and Very Large Telescope data hints at the presence of first-generation stars in its entrails.
Such fiery celestial bodies, known as Population III stars, were forged from the primordial elements in the cosmos and were hundreds if not nearly a thousand times bigger than our parent star, the Sun.
These first-generation stars are believed to have exploded into supernovae after merely a couple of years or so. By comparison, the Sun is estimated to be about 4.6 billion years old.
Together with other primordial stars, the ones in the newly discovered CR7 galaxy forged the elements needed to create the stars that now populate the cosmos. The same elements birthed life on Earth.
“Those stars were the ones that formed the first heavy atoms that ultimately allowed us to be here. It doesn’t really get any more exciting than this,” explains study leader David Sobral.
