The Hubble Space Telescope has detected a tiny galaxy, one of the oldest known, located more than 13 billion light years away. The cosmic object existed at a time when the Universe was only 500 million years old.
The team of researchers responsible for the finding, coordinated by astrophysicist Adi Zitrin, from the California Institute of Technology, estimates that it is only 850 light years long, this is about 500 times smaller than the Milky Way. Furthermore, its mass is barely 40 million suns, when that of our galaxy is several hundred billion.
To locate this ancient galaxy, experts used the huge cluster Abell 2744 as a gravitational lens. This is so massive that its gravity bends the light, as if it were a cosmic magnifying glass. This allows us to see the very distant stellar structures behind it – in the Hubble images, several of them appear in boxes a, b and c -, which are much larger and brighter than normal.
