The Hubble Space Telescope has captured what astronomers are claiming is the oldest galaxy in the universe. Here’s some of what NASA’s Hubble website says about the discovery
“The farthest and one of the very earliest galaxies ever seen in the universe appears as a faint red blob in this ultra-deep–field exposure taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This is the deepest infrared image taken of the universe. Based on the object’s color, astronomers believe it is 13.2 billion light-years away.
The dim object is a compact galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the Big Bang, only four percent of the universe’s current age. It is tiny and considered a building block of today’s giant galaxies. Over one hundred such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way galaxy.”
Think of that – the light from this object we’re seeing now took 13.2 billion years to reach our eyes. That’s mind-boggling. We’re actually looking back in time. Anyway, the study which appears in the journal Nature, was led by Rychard Bouwens at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, and Garth Illingworth, of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The tiny smudge of light will be further studied and confirmed when the infrared-optimized James Webb Space Telescope is up and running in 2014.
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