Astronomers Discover Farthest Galaxy; 13. 1 Billion Light-years Away

WASHINGTON, United States — a baby blue galaxy was discovered by the astronomers naming it as the farthest in distance and time that any galaxy ever seen.

This handout photo provided by NASA and the European Space Agency, taken in 2013 with NASA's Hubble space telescope, shows a galaxy from the farthest distance recorded: 13.1 billion light-years. It is from a time just 670 million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers have discovered a baby blue galaxy that is the farthest away in distance and time that they’ve ever seen. It’s from 13.1 billion years ago, during the universe’s first generation of galaxies. (Pascal Oesch and Ivelina Momcheva, NASA, European Space Agency via AP)
This handout photo provided by NASA and the European Space Agency, taken in 2013 with NASA’s Hubble space telescope, shows a galaxy from the farthest distance recorded: 13.1 billion light-years. It is from a time just 670 million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers have discovered a baby blue galaxy that is the farthest away in distance and time that they’ve ever seen. It’s from 13.1 billion years ago, during the universe’s first generation of galaxies. (Pascal Oesch and Ivelina Momcheva, NASA, European Space Agency via AP)

Yale and University of California Santa Cruz scientists used three different telescopes to spot and then calculate the age of the blurry infant galaxy.

The newly discovered EGS-zs8-1 was identified to be about 670 million years after the Big Bang through measuring how the light has shifted.

Because when astronomers look farther away from Earth, they are looking back further in time, this is both the most distant galaxy and the furthest back in time. It’s 13.1 billion light-years away, in the constellation Bootes. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles (9.3 trillion kilometers).

Astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California Santa Cruz, who co-authored the paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters announcing the discovery, said the discovery feats the old record by about 30 million years, which isn’t much, but was difficult to achieve.

Illingworth also added that the photo they took was from a crucial time in the early universe, after what was called the Dark Ages, when galaxies and stars were just starting to form and the universe was only one five hundredth the mass it is now.

“We’re looking here at an infant that’s growing at a great rate,” he said. The galaxy was giving birth to stars at 80 times the rate our Milky Way does now. “These objects would like nothing like our sun. It would look much, much bluer.”

The hardest work was confirming the age and distance using the ground-based Keck Observatory in Hawaii to separate light waves after Yale astronomer Pascal Oesch discovered it when he was looking through Hubble Space Telescope images in 2013 when he saw a bright object.

He then used the Spitzer space telescope to see it again.

H/T: Inquirer.net

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