LONDON: Scientists have found the farthest known galaxy, located about 13.2 billion light years away. This breaks the record set only recently, in May this year, for the farthest known galaxy. Both were found by the twin telescopes of the Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
Seeing it now means that light from the new record holder, dubbed EGSY8p7, must have started when the Universe was an infant in cosmic time – just 600 million years old because it was 13.8 billion years ago that the Universe is believed to have been born after the Big Bang.
In May this year, scientists had found EGS-zs8-1, a galaxy located 13 billion light years away. They had also used the Keck Observatory to find the galaxy. In recent years, with increasing power at their disposal, the record for most distant galaxies has frequently tumbled.
Interestingly, the scientists captured an image of hydrogen emission (called the Lyman-alpha line) from the distant galaxy. This is a very rare event because that far back in time the whole Universe was supposed to be just emerging from a cloud of hydrogen that filled the whole space. The discovery will give important insight into how the very first stars in the Universe lit-up after the Big Bang. The paper will be published shortly in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
