Astrophysicists are seeing further away into the universe, which means they’re seeing further back in time. So the recently discovered most distant galaxy may have formed soon after the big bang. Here’s more from Popular Science:
“It was very hard work to find HD1 out of more than 700,000 objects,” [University of Tokyo astronomer Yuichi Harikane] said in a press release. “HD1’s red color matched the expected characteristics of a galaxy 13.5 billion light-years away surprisingly well, giving me a little bit of goosebumps when I found it.”
Harikane and his team spent over 1,200 hours capturing images through the VISTA Telescope in Chile, the former Spitzer Space Telescope, and both the UK Infrared Telescope and the Subaru Telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii. They then used an array of radio wavelength receivers, also in Chile, to calculate redshift, a formula that helps astronomers estimate distances based on how light changes as the universe expands. The data showed an unexpectedly bright UV signature from HD1, which the study argues is due to one of two causes.
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