An international team of astronomers, led by scientists from Yale University and the University of California (USA), have found a galaxy that formed more than 13,000 million years ago and which, according to measurements, is the galaxy most distant ever known. A new record in the astronomical world. The study has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters .
The exploration of the universe with NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes has led this group of astronomers to a time when it was only 5% of its current age . This is precisely where this distant galaxy, named EGS-zs8-1, is located.
The galaxy in question, confirmed thanks to the new MOSFIRE instrument at Keck 1 Observatory (Hawaii), is astonishingly luminous and one of the most massive objects in the early universe . The data of the work also explains that the measurement of the exact distance of this galaxy with respect to the Earth has allowed to determine that EGS-zs8-1 was still forming stars very quickly, even 80 times faster than our galaxy, the Milky Way.
These new observations confirm that massive galaxies already existed in the early universe and that their physical properties were very different from the galaxies observed around Earth today: “It appears that young stars in early galaxies like EGS-zs8-1 they were the main drivers of this transition of the Universe called reionization ”, explains Rychard Bouwens, co-author of the study.
