NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has just broken cosmic distance records to measure its farthest galaxy yet – by viewing what it looked like 13.4 billion years ago. The space observatory found galaxy GN-z11 while it was gazing in the direction of Ursa Major constellation.
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The Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre in Germany issued a statement wherein Pascal Oesch, an astronomer at Yale University and lead author of the research paper disclosing the latest measurement said, “We’ve taken major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble”.
The GN-z11 galaxy is about 25 times smaller than the Milky Way, the galaxy that includes Earth. G. Brammer (STScI), P. van Dokkum (Yale University), and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz).
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has photographed what appears to be a big double-bladed lightsaber inside the Orion B molecular cloud complex, located at 1350 light-years from Earth.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope may soon be giving way to the James Webb Space Telescope, but while it’s still active, it just keeps outdoing itself, having recently been confirmed to have spotted the farthest and oldest galaxy ever seen.
Astronomers measure the distance of far-away galaxies by their “redshift”, because the farther away an object is from us, the more its light is stretched to longer, redder wavelengths, according to the site.
Scientists are claiming that they have identified the galaxy from a time when the universe was only around 400 million years old. Though really hot enough to burn bright blue, it appears darkish red and fuzzy in a photo because the light has traveled so long and far enough that it has shifted to the very end of the color spectrum, to a dark reddish color. This time, they relied on Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to spectroscopically measure the galaxies redshift for the first time. With every step, we are closing in on seeing what the very first galaxies that formed in our Universe looked like.
Earlier studies have measured the distance to GN-z11 by analyzing the colors of the galaxy in images taken by both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. These hazy clouds, pictured floating above and below IRAS 12196-6300, are created when light from a star reflects off a high concentration of nearby dust, such as the dusty material still remaining from IRAS 12196-6300’s formation.
The press release adds that the sighting was thought to only be possible with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, which will only be ready for showtime in 2018.
“The discovery of GN-z11 showed us that our knowledge about the early Universe is still very restricted”.
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The animation below shows the location of galaxy GN-z11, now the farthest galaxy ever seen. The previous record holder was a galaxy with a redshift of 8.68 (GN-z11 has a redshift of 11.1). “This new record will likely stand until the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope”.
