NEW YORK: A team of astronomers has measured a galaxy farther than any other ever seen by human beings, reporting this week that the ancient star system offers a glimpse of what the universe was like not all that long after the beginning of time.
Astronomers from Yale University and the University of California Santa Cruz announced in the Astrophysical Journal that they had identified a galaxy that formed about 13.1bn years ago, making it the earliest measured galaxy known in the 13.8bn-year history of the universe since the big bang.
The newly measured galaxy, given the unromantic moniker EGS-zs8-1, now holds the record for distance: because the universe has continued to expand since its original existential spasm, early galaxies moved farther and farther outward over the millennia, eventually putting EGS-zs8-1 an estimated 30bn light-years away from Earth.
But because light can only travel so fast through the vast distances of space, what reaches Earth is actually old light – the sight of what the sun looked like a few minutes ago rather than what it looks like at that moment.
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