NASA's Hubble spots most distant galaxy ever seen in the universe

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NASA's Hubble spots most distant galaxy ever seen in the universe

2011-01-27 06:55:25 GMT+7 (ICT)

WASHINGTON, D.C. (BNO NEWS) -- NASA on Wednesday announced that astronomers have pushed its Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe.

The object's light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the previous record holder. The age of the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years.

The tiny, dim object is a compact galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the big bang, and more than 100 such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up the Milky Way, NASA explained.

In addition, the agency said that the new research offers surprising evidence that the rate of star birth in the early universe grew dramatically, increasing by about a factor of 10 from 480 million years to 650 million years after the big bang.

"NASA continues to reach for new heights, and this latest Hubble discovery will deepen our understanding of the universe and benefit generations to come," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who was the pilot of the space shuttle mission that carried Hubble to orbit.

"We could only dream when we launched Hubble more than 20 years ago that it would have the ability to make these types of groundbreaking discoveries and rewrite textbooks," Bolden added.

Astronomers don't know exactly when the first stars appeared in the universe, but every step farther from Earth takes them deeper into the early formative years when stars and galaxies began to emerge in the aftermath of the big bang.

This observation was made with the Wide Field Camera 3 starting just a few months after it was installed in the observatory in May 2009, during the last NASA space shuttle servicing mission to Hubble. After more than a year of detailed observations and analysis, the object was positively identified in the camera's Hubble Ultra Deep Field-Infrared data taken in the late summers of 2009 and 2010.

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