Some speculation it could harbour a galaxy lit by a super-massive black hole or could be two merging galaxies.
The size of this blob in the early universe could mean the standard models of the way galaxies form are wrong.
Oh well! Back to the drawing board.
"Himiko - named after a mysterious queen of Chinese and Japanese legend - contains more than 10 times as much mass as galaxies of a similar age." Whoah!
Interesting article. However this blob of material is not 12. 5 billion l/ys distant. The photons from it have taken 12.5 billion years to reach Earth, however during that time, due to the expansion of space, both the Earth and this blob have moved apart considerably.
The recessional velocity at this distance is about 270,000 km/sec, approaching the speed of light thus the distance to this object would be billions of l/yrs further.
Another most interesting aside, assuming a Hubble Constant of 70km/s/Mpc, is that the separation between this blob and our host Galaxy, when the photons currently reaching us left the object, would have been considerably less than 12.5 billion l/yrs.
Yet another thing to ponder is that this blob, which was a blob 12.5 billion years ago has probably evolved into a quite mature galaxy by now.
If thinking about all of this doesn't give you all a headache then nothing will.
Well, if space/time is curved, then it's only reasonably to think that some areas of space are more dense [with matter] than others. Due to gravitational lumping, I would then logically conclude that the denser the area, the more matter, the more clumping, and thus the larger the galaxy. Since we know that the Universe is not consistent in the dispersion of matter, it stands to solid reason that even at such an early period in the development of the Universe that there would be rippling, and thus a higher concentration of matter in certain parts.
I'm not surprised to see such a large galaxy like structure at such a distance age. I suspect that we'll find more as time goes by.
