Science

Astronomers confirm oldest, most distant known object

Galaxy GN-z11, 13.4bn light years away, came into existence 400m years after Big Bang

Hubble Space telescope image shows the Galaxy GN-z11, shown in the inset, as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the big bang. Photograph: Reuters/NASA
Hubble Space telescope image shows the Galaxy GN-z11, shown in the inset, as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the big bang. Photograph: Reuters/NASA
Fri Mar 04 2016 - 08:02

A galaxy far, far away has shattered the cosmic distance record set by astronomers.

Scientists pushed the Hubble Space Telescope to its limits to confirm that the galaxy is 13.4 billion light years away, the most distant and oldest object known in the universe.

The light we see from the galaxy began its long journey through space just 400 million years after the Big Bang gave birth to the universe.

Astronomers measured the distance to the galaxy, known as GN-z11, by splitting its light up into its component colours.

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Because of the expansion of the universe, distant objects flying away from us have their light stretched to the red end of the spectrum — a phenomenon known as “red shift”.

The larger an object’s red shift, the further away it is.

Previously a galaxy called EGSY8p7 held the red shift record, a figure of 8.68. But GN-z11 has a red shift of 11.1, corresponding to just 400 million years after the universe began.

Dr Pascal Oesch, a member of the team from Yale University in the US, said: "We've taken a major step back in time, beyond what we'd ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We managed to look back in time to measure the distance to a galaxy when the universe was only 3 per cent of its current age."

The Big Bang is thought to have brought everything that now exists into being around 13.8 billion years ago.

GN-z11 is believed to be 25 times smaller than the Milky Way, but growing fast and spawning new stars 20 times faster than our galaxy.

The findings, reported in the Astrophysical Journal, raise many questions because according to current theories of cosmic evolution even a galaxy of this size should not have existed so long ago.

Co-author of the paper Dr Ivo Labbe, from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, said: "The discovery of GN-z11 showed us that our knowledge about the early universe is still very restricted. How GN-z11 was created remains somewhat of a mystery for now.

“Probably we are seeing the first generations of stars forming around black holes.”

PA