Live
- Checking Our Spirituality
- Turning Inward
- Blame Or Change: The Choice Is Ours
- Bejan Daruwalla’s horoscope
- Centre keen to set up acqua industries says Union Minister Bhupathiraju Srinivasa Varma
- Sabir Sardar’s Journey: From Slums to Global Galleries
- Northeast culture and tradition come to life at the President’s retreat
- lord Malayappa blesses devotees as Murali Krishna
- Bottled up in the Black Sea
- Whose ‘developed country’ will it be?
Hubble telescope's latest find pushes back clock on galaxy formation
By pushing NASAs Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. This surprisingly bright infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past,
​Washington: By pushing NASAs Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. This surprisingly bright infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 200-300 million years after the Big Bang. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major.
“We've taken a major step back in time, beyond what we'd ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” explained principal investigator Pascal Oesch from Yale University.
The team includes scientists from Yale University, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and the University of California. The new Hubble observations take astronomers into a realm that was once thought to be only reachable with NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope which is scheduled to be operational in 2018.
This measurement provides strong evidence that some unusual and unexpectedly bright galaxies found earlier in Hubble images are really at extraordinary distances. Astronomers measure large distances by determining the "redshift" of a galaxy.
This phenomenon is a result of the expansion of the universe; every distant object in the universe appears to be receding from us because its light is stretched to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels through expanding space to reach our telescopes. The greater the redshift, the farther the galaxy.
