Tapping the powerful Hubble Space Telescope and a rare quirk of cosmic physics, astronomers have discovered the most distant galaxy in the universe, a faint, record-setting smear of light that flared 750 million years after the Big Bang.
If confirmed, astronomers said, the discovery could provide new clues to fundamental questions such as when stars first began to shine and how a few simple chemical building blocks in the early universe evolved into the dazzling gallery of objects we see today.
“My initial impression is: Wow!” said Harry Ferguson, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who was not involved in the discovery.
“It’s spectacular to find a galaxy that distant.”
The infant galaxy, yet to be named, was found among a massive galactic cluster known as Abell 2218. Richard Ellis, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and a member of the discovery team, said the object is roughly 13 billion light-years away. One light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 5.8 trillion miles.
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The galaxy, said Ellis, likely was among the first formed after the mysterious period astronomers refer to as the “Dark Ages,” an epoch before the lights in the universe came on. “In human terms, the universe isn’t even on its feet yet, it’s a toddler,” he said.
A paper describing the find will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The astronomers discovered the object using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Installed by shuttle astronauts in 2002, the $75 million instrument is one of the most sensitive light detectors available to astronomers. Even so, Ellis and his team had Hubble stare at the same patch of sky for 15 hours to capture enough light.
The astronomers also used the largest ground-based telescope, the W.M. Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, to nail down the precise age of the newly discovered object. After two consecutive nights of observing, they determined that the light began its journey toward Earth 750 million years after the birth of the universe.
In all, the newly found galaxy is less than one-tenth the size of our own, the Milky Way. Preliminary evidence also indicated it contains huge stars many times the size of our sun.