Observing deep space is almost like a journey through time: the further we look into the seemingly infinite Universe, the deeper back in time we can observe the events that took place. More recently, a group of researchers led by astronomers from Yale University and the University of California at Santa Cruz announced the discovery of the most distant galaxy from us.
The galaxy, called EGS-zs8-1, is so far away from us that the light emitted by it, which is about 13 billion years old, is only now beginning to reach us. Recall that the age of the universe itself is estimated by scientists at 13.8 billion years. This means that the detected galaxy began its formation when the age of the Universe was only 5 percent of the current - approximately 670 million years after the Big Bang.
“By that time, EGS-zs8-1 already had more than 15 percent of the total mass of our Milky Way, which our galaxy possesses today,” said Yale astronomer Pascal Osh in a statement.
“It is worth considering that she had only 670 million years for this. The universe at that time was still very young. ”
On the discovery of astronomers from two universities on May 5 an article was published in the scientific journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. The Hubble Space Telescope helped discover the EGS-zs8-1 galaxy. To confirm the discovery, the MOSFIRE instrument installed on the Keck-1 10-meter telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii was used. According to researchers, it was not difficult to find the galaxy, as it was one of the brightest objects in space of the young Universe.
Scientists plan to conduct further research of the detected galaxy (and also to understand how it could help shape the shape of the early Universe) after a new generation telescope, the James Webb Telescope, was launched into space in 2018.
“Our current observations show that thanks to the new Telescope named after James Webb, in the future it will be very easy to determine the exact distances to galaxies so distant from us,” said study co-author Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz. “Thanks to the data that the telescope named after James Webb can provide us, we will get a much more complete picture of the formation of galaxies since the beginning of the appearance of space.”
The article is based on materials .
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