Astronomers have discovered a blue galaxy that is farther away in distance and time than any galaxy ever found.
It is one of the first generation of galaxies in the universe, dating back 13.1 billion years.
Scientists from Yale University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, used three different telescopes to discover the fuzzy, young galaxy and calculate its age.
By measuring how the light was shifted, the team determined that the galaxy, called EGS-zs8-1, dates to about 670 million years after the Big Bang.
As astronomers look further away from Earth, they are looking even further into the past, so this is both the most distant galaxy and the most distant past.
It is located 13.1 billion light years away in the constellation Boötes.
One light year is 5.8 trillion miles.
That’s about 30 million years longer than the previous record, which isn’t much but was hard to achieve, said Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who co-authored the Astrophysical Journal Letters paper that announced the discovery.
Illingworth said their picture dates to a critical period in the early universe after what is known as the Dark Age, when galaxies and stars were just beginning to form and the universe was just 500 times less massable than it is today.
The galaxy, larger than most other galaxies at the time and therefore visible to astronomers using today’s most powerful telescopes, was probably only about 100 million years old but was very active, Illingworth said.
“We’re looking at an infant here who is growing at an incredible rate,” he said.
In this galaxy, stars were being born 80 times faster than in the present Milky Way.
“These objects will not resemble our Sun at all. They will appear much bluer.”
Yale University astronomer Pascal Oesch discovered a bright object while looking at images from the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013.
He then observed it again using the Spitzer Space Telescope.
The hardest part was using the ground-based Keck Observatory in Hawaii to separate the light waves and determine their age and distance.
Breaking News – May 6th
