An infant blue galaxy has been marked by astronomers in the distance and time which is much farther away than any other galaxy that has ever been witnessed. This one is the universe’s first generation of galaxies and is of about 13.1 billion years ago.
Scientists from Yale and University of Santa Cruz have employed 3 telescopes for spotting it and then calculating the age of the fuzzy baby galaxy. They determined the age of the galaxy called EGS-zs8-1 to be about 670 million years following the Big Bang by measuring the way the light has shifted.
When astronomers are looking further away from the Earth, they are fundamentally looking further back in time, so this is not only the most distant galaxy but also the furthest back in time. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles and EGS-zs8-1 is 13.1 billion light-years away in the constellation Bootes.
Therefore the previous record is broken by 30 million years which may not be a lot but had been hard to attain, according to astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California Santa Cruz, co-authored the paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters declaring the discovery.
Illingworth said that the photo taken by the team of scientists had been of a critical time in the early universe, following the era that was known as the Dark Ages, when galaxies and stars had just started forming and the universe had only been 1/500th of the mass that it is today.
This galaxy had been larger than most of its others from that time, therefore astronomers had to employ the most effective and powerful telescope for seeing it now, and it had possibly been just about 100 million years of age too and pretty busy as well, as Illingworth notes.
He said, “We’re looking here at an infant that’s growing at a great rate.” The galaxy had been giving birth to stars at 80 times the rate our Milky Way does today. “These objects would like nothing like our sun. It would look much, much bluer.”
In 2013, Pascal Oesch, astronomer from Yale had been looking through the Hubble Space Telescope images when he came across a bright object. Oesh then employed the Spitzer space telescope for seeing it again. The most difficult part had been to confirm the age and distance with the help of the ground-based Keck Observatory in Hawaii in order to separate light waves.
Steven Myers
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