Astronomers using the Keck I telescope atop Mauna Kea say they have spotted a galaxy more than 13 billion light years away.
The discovery of the farthest object ever seen in the universe was made by an international team of astronomers led by Yale and the University of California, Santa Cruz, according to W. M. Keck Observatory. The findings were being published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on Tuesday.
The galaxy, EGS-zs8-1, is one of the brightest and most massive objects in the early universe and was originally identified based on its particular colors in images from NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, according to Keck.
Yale’s Pascal Oesch, the lead author of the study, said the universe was only 670 million years old at the time it was observed, however, the galaxy already had a mass more than 15 percent of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Only a handful of galaxies currently have accurate distances measured in this epoch of the universe. EGS-zs8-1 is the youngest such galaxy to be measured. The new distance measurement also enabled the astronomers to determine that EGS-zs8-1 was still forming stars very rapidly, about 80 times faster than the Milky Way galaxy today.
The measurements come from the MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration) instrument on the Keck I telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea. The relatively new instrument on telescope allows astronomers to efficiently study several galaxies at the same time.
The observations see EGS-zs8-1 at a time when the universe was undergoing very important changes as the hydrogen between galaxies transitioned from a neutral to an ionized state.
“Every confirmation adds another piece to the puzzle of how the first generations of galaxies formed in the early universe,” said Pieter van Dokkum of the Yale University, second author of the study. “Only the largest telescopes are powerful enough to reach to these large distances.”