A team of astronomers identified the brightest galaxy from the universe's earliest known years and named it for one of the most recognizable athletes active today.
According to CBS News, authors of a study published in the Astrophysical Journal named the galaxy CR7, a hat-tip to Christiano Ronaldo, a soccer superstar who wears the number 7 for his Real Madrid club and the Portuguese national team. Some of the stars in CR7 are the oldest ever spotted and may allow the astronomers to glimpse the first ones to appear in the universe.
"The discovery challenged our expectations from the start, as we didn't expect to find such a bright galaxy," study lead author David Sobral, of the University of Lisbon in Portugal, said in a European Southern Observatory press release. "Then, by unveiling the nature of CR7 piece by piece, we understood that not only had we found by far the most luminous distant galaxy, but also started to realize that it had every single characteristic expected of Population III stars. 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."
Known as Population III, the stars the astronomers observed are believed to contain materials gathered during the Big Bang. These stars would have exploded into supernovae after some time, but they left behind luminous remnants.
"I have always wondered where we come from," study co-author Jorryt Matthee, of Leiden University, said in the release. "Even as a child I wanted to know where the elements come from: the calcium in my bones, the carbon in my muscles, the iron in my blood. I found out that these were first formed at the very beginning of the Universe, by the first generation of stars. With this discovery, remarkably, we are starting to actually see such objects for the first time."
