Hubble Telescope spots the farthest galaxy seen in the known universe
We have a new galactic record, folks.
The Hubble Space Telescope has found the most distant galaxy yet seen, and it's a doozy. It took 13.4 billion years for the light emitted from the galaxy -- named GN-z11 -- to reach astronomers on Earth.
That means that GN-z11 existed only 400 million years after the Big Bang occurred, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
You May Also Like
“This discovery pushes back the frontier of our knowledge regarding the earliest phases of the Universe and advances our quest to witness cosmic dawn," Patrick McCarthy, Interim President of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization, told Mashable via email.
"Clear evidence that stars and galaxies formed soon after the Big Bang will challenge competing theories regarding the formation of the modern universe."
Scientists had used other measurements to estimate GN-z11's distance, but this is the first time Hubble's uniquely capable camera, known as the Wide Field Camera 3, has been able to pinpoint its extreme position by examining the light emitted by the cosmic object.
"We've taken a major step back in time, beyond what we'd ever expected to be able to do with Hubble," Pascal Oesch, one of the authors of a forthcoming study detailing the new galaxy find, said in a statement.
"We managed to look back in time to measure the distance to a galaxy when the universe was only three percent of its current age."
In astronomy, distance and age are linked. The farther an object is from Earth, the more time it took for its light to reach the planet.
The Milky Way galaxy, within which Earth is located, is about 25 times larger than GN-z11, and the record-holding galaxy has 1 percent of the Milky Way's mass in stars, the ESA said.
While the number of stars contained in the galaxy are fewer than the Milky Way, GN-z11 is producing new stars at a rate 20 times faster than our galaxy, the agency added.
"It's amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form," astronomer Garth Illingworth said in the statement.
"It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon."
This finding is also unexpected.
"The discovery of GN-z11 showed us that our knowledge about the early Universe is still very restricted," scientist Ivo Labbe said in the statement.
"How GN-z11 was created remains somewhat of a mystery for now. Probably we are seeing the first generations of stars forming around black holes?"
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Measuring the distances to far-off objects is exceedingly complicated because the universe is constantly expanding.
Because of that expansion, far away objects look like they are literally moving away from the planet, shifting the light of the objects into longer, redder wavelengths, ESA said.
Scientists use a measurement of this stretched light, called "redshift," to talk about the distances of objects in the early universe.
The galaxy EGSY8p7, the last "most distant" galaxy, was measured at a redshift of 8.68, but GN-z11 was found at a redshift of 11.1.
"The previous record-holder was seen in the middle of the epoch when starlight from primordial galaxies was beginning to heat and lift a fog of cold, hydrogen gas," co-author Rychard Bouwens said.
"This transitional period is known as the reionisation era. GN-z11 is observed 150 million years earlier, near the very beginning of this transition in the evolution of the Universe."
Researchers hope that this discovery is a hint at what may be to come with the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's successor, that is expected to launch in 2018.
The James Webb is specifically designed to look for some of the earliest galaxies that formed just after the Big Bang.
The new galaxy study will be published in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
UPDATE: March 3, 2016, 6:30 p.m. EST This story was updated to include comment from Patrick McCarthy.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
