The galaxy codenamed as EGS8p7 is estimated to be about 13.2 billion years old, while according to theories that have been accepted, the universe came to be over 13.8 billion years ago. In a paper published online in the journal Nature Communications, they describe the use of a novel statistical method to analyze data captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope during deep-sky surveys. That will provide greater resolution with its images, Mitchell-Wynne said. The method enabled the scientists to parse out signals from the noise in Hubble’s deep-sky images, providing the first estimate of the number of small, primordial galaxies in the early universe. “To put that in perspective, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is forming stars at the rate of only about one solar mass per year”.
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Co-author Prof Asantha Cooray, also from the University of California, Irvine, pointed to recent probes into extragalactic infrared background light by the California Institute of Technology’s CIBER instrument.
But with the use of Hubble Telescope, the astronomers claimed that they were able to make a new discovery.
In addition, University of College London professor of astrophysics, Richard Ellis, shares, “The surprising aspect about the present discovery is that we have detected this Lyman-alpha line in an apparently faint galaxy at a redshift of 8.68, corresponding to a time when the universe should be full of absorbing hydrogen clouds”. “From the CIBER analysis, we knew there would be a detection of intrahalo light in the infrared bands”. Astronomers are almost positive that there are billions more galaxies that we still can’t observe with the technology we have available. With Hubble data, we saw a large drop in the amplitude of the signal between the two.
Scientists have created the most accurate statistical description of the earliest-known galaxies known to science.
One is the galaxy’s redshift, a result of the Doppler effect. While brighter galaxies and stars show up in the Hubble’s field of vision clear as day, the most distant and faint galaxies appear as a tiresome red glow. We do not see that signal in the optical [wavelengths], only in infrared. “This is confirmation that the signal is from early times in the Universe”.
The discovery of EGS8p7 could be related and is significant to the report that a group of researchers have found the galaxy that was formed right after when Big Bang happened. The main differences being that were fainter and highly populated by giant stars.
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It’s an extraordinary opportunity for researchers, not just because it represents the farthest galaxy ever recorded, but because it allows scientists to study how galaxies form in the early universe, and thus answer some unexplained questions on the evolution of galaxies that are much closer to us.
