ASTRONOMERS SCANNING for objects at the very edge of the visible universe have discovered the earliest galaxy yet found. They believe it formed just 480 million years after the Big Bang that created space-time.
This also makes the galaxy the most distant object from us discovered to date. It is about 13.2 billion light-years away, according to the international team of researchers who made the find and describe their efforts in the journal Nature.
Scientists are on a never-ending quest to find distant galaxies because these will also be the ones that formed soonest after the Big Bang. Astronomers believe we might be able to understand more about the cosmos and its structures by studying these objects.
Such is their success, however, that they may soon come up against a natural limit.
“We are getting back very close to the first galaxies, which we think formed around 200 to 300 million years after the Big Bang,” said Prof Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
He and Prof Rychard Bouwens of Leiden University in the Netherlands led the study. They and colleagues used the wide-field planetary camera three on board the Hubble space telescope, collecting 87 hours of observational data over the last two years.
“This result is on the edge of our capabilities, but we spent months doing tests to confirm it, so we now feel pretty confident,” Prof Illingworth said.