The Most Distant Galaxy Discovered
Marco Foronda | | May 06, 2015 03:12 AM EDT |
(Photo : Pascal Oesch / Ivelina Momcheva / NASA / European Space Agency) Photo of the most distant galaxy ever recorded.
A new galaxy, the farthest in terms of time and distance among other galaxies, was discovered by an international team of astronomers, according to a new study published by the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The team, led by scientists from the University of California Santa Cruz and Yale University, used three powerful instruments - NASA's Space Hubble, Keck I, and Spitzer space telescopes - to calculate its age and distance.
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The baby blue galaxy called EGS-zs8-1 is only 100 million years old and is still at the phase of giving birth to stars, 80 times the rate our Milky Way does at present, according to the study.
Astronomers are looking at a young galaxy that has been in existence since the Dark Ages or when galaxies were just starting to form. The reason for this discrepancy is that when astronomers look farther from Earth, they look back in time. And the time they are looking at now is 13.1 billion years back.
"Every confirmation adds another piece to the puzzle of how the first generations of galaxies formed in the early universe," the study's co-author Pieter van Dokkum said.
Astronomers believe that this galaxy was one of the biggest and brightest matter when the universe was younger, 13.1 billion years ago.
According to the data, it is among the first generation of galaxies in the universe, forming between 400 and 600 million years following the Big Bang. At this point, the universe was only 5 percent of its current age, which is 13.8 billion years, co-author Garth Illingworth said.
The discovery affirmed astronomers that massive galaxies did exist in the young universe, albeit differences in physical properties.
Pascal Oesch, the lead researcher from Yale, first stumbled upon the new galaxy through an image taken by the Hubble telescope in 2013.
Since then, he and his team worked to calculate its age and distance using other high-powered telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
TagsGalaxy, astronomers, Astronomy, Space, NASA, Hubble Space Telescope, Yale University, University of California, spitzer space telescope, Keck I
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