A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away … billions of years after its formation, when light from the galaxy ‘hit’ a mirror on an orbiting solar powered satellite, we were able to verify its existence . A milestone in astronomy. The scientific community, thanks to the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope, has announced the cosmic distance record by measuring the distance to the farthest galaxy ever seen in the Universe.
The galaxy in question has been christened GN-z11 and existed only 400 million years after the Big Bang. The distance has been calculated from its spectrum (with Hubble’s wide field camera 3), by dividing the light into its colors, so the measurement is completely reliable. It is undoubtedly one of the very old specimens of the first generation of galaxies.
Despite the incredible distance that separates us, the galaxy is extremely bright, which again gives us data to cover the information about how the first galaxies formed in the early universe.
Although we thought that these extreme observation distances would not be possible until the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (October 2018), Hubble once again proves its worth by testing all its limits, since it is at the maximum distance to the one that Hubble can observe.
According to data from the telescope, the galaxy is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way and only has 1% of the mass of our galaxy in stars. But GN-z11 is creating stars 20 times faster than our galaxy. It was precisely thanks to this high rate of star formation and the consequent brightness that it causes, that the Hubble telescope has been able to detect it despite the fact that its existence had no theoretical basis.
The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.
