Posted on Thursday, January 27 2011 @ 16:44 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Astronomers may have discovered the most distant object ever observed. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers discovered a new galaxy, named UDFj-39546284, about 13.2 billion light years away. The previous record was held by UDFy-38135539, a galaxy located about 13.1 billion light years away.
A candidate for the most-distant galaxy ever spotted has shown up in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The faint fuzzy blob, whose light reached Hubble from just 480 million years after the Big Bang, could be a landmark in galaxy detection.
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The new galaxy, called UDFj-39546284, is about 13.2 billion light-years away. The last record holder was confirmed in October 2010 at 13.1 billion light-years away. Both galaxies were spotted in a Hubble image called the Ultra Deep Field, which captures 10,000 galaxies in the universe’s earliest millennia.
Although the new galaxy is not, in astronomical terms, much farther away than the next-most-distant galaxy, it may be the first to hit “redshift 10,” a distance milestone that astronomers have been aiming at for decades.
More info
at Wired.
