The farthest galaxy ever observed and old [PHOTOS] – International Business Times Italian

Galaxy from the past, when the universe was an age of a few hundred million years, the 5% of its current life was observed by an international team of astronomers together with colleagues at Yale University and the California and Santa Cruz, he is managing to get even an image of the galaxy more distant (and old) ever observed. The galaxy in question takes the unpronounceable name, as is normal, EGS-zs8-1 and is one of the most massive and luminous objects in the early universe. The result of this research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The astronomers could observe the galaxy whose light has been traveling for more than 13 billion years before reaching the spectrometer MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration) installed at the telescope WM Keck 10-meter Keck Observatory located in Hawaii. According to the data available to scientists, this is the most distant galaxy ever observed. Galaxy EGS-zs8-1 is therefore 13.1 billion light years from Earth, the largest measured distance between our planet and another galaxy.

It is thought that the universe has an age of 13.8 billion years, so EGS-zs8-1 is one of the first galaxies to have formed in the universe, at least until the discoveries of today. Thanks to telescopes Hubble, Spitzer and Keck has been able to get to this discovery. “As we observe the galaxy 13 billion years ago, has already grown to more than 15 per cent of the mass of our Milky Way,” he said Pascal Oesch , author of the study at Yale University, New Haven Connecticut.

Currently few primordial galaxies were observed, all “younger” EGS-zs8-1: “Every other confirmation adds another piece to the puzzle that tells us how it formed the first generation of galaxies, but only the larger telescopes are powerful enough to capture the light of these extremely distant galaxies, “he said Pieter van Dokkum at Yale University and co-author of the study.

The new findings obtained by the observatory Keck help to give more information on how galaxies form very distant and especially of their physical properties, different than what exists today, “every discovery opens a lot of new questions, “said Oesch.