Astronomers Discover Farthest Galaxy Yet

GN-z11: Astronomers Discover Farthest Galaxy Yet

Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have found a surprisingly bright, infant galaxy 13.4 billion light-years from us, making it the most distant galaxy ever detected.

GN-z11, shown in the inset, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Image credit: NASA / ESA / P. Oesch, Yale University / G. Brammer, STScI / P. van Dokkum, Yale University / G. Illingworth, University of California, Santa Cruz.

This galaxy, dubbed GN-z11, is located in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major.

It is approximately 25 times smaller than the Milky Way Galaxy and has just 1% of our galaxy’s mass in stars.

GN-z11 is the subject of a study accepted for publication in theAstrophysical Journal (arXiv.org preprint).

“We see GN-z11 at a time when the Universe was only 3% of its current age,” said Yale University astronomer Dr. Pascal Oesch, lead author on the study.

Dr. Oesch and co-authors usedHubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to precisely measure the distance to the galaxy spectroscopically by splitting the light into its component colors.

“We pushed Hubble to its limits to get the spectroscopic data needed to determine the galaxy’s redshift, a measure of its distance from Earth,” said co-author Prof. Garth Illingworth, of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This graphic shows a timeline of the Universe, stretching from the present day (left) all the way back to the Big Bang (right). The position of GN-z11 is shown not far from where the first stars began to form. The previous record holder’s position is also identified. Image credit: NASA / ESA / A. Field, STScI.

Before the astronomers determined the distance for GN-z11, the most distant galaxy measured spectroscopically – EGSY8p7 – had a redshift of 8.68 (13.2 billion years in the past).

GN-z11 has a redshift of 11.1, nearly 200 million years closer to the Big Bang.

“It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form,” Prof. Illingworth said.

“It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon.”