Researchers have discovered the most distant galaxy known to man, it is believed to have been created within 700 million years of the Big Bang.
"It's exciting to know we're the first people in the world to see this," Vithal Tilvi, a Texas A&M postdoctoral research associate and co-author of the paper, said in a Texas A&M University news release. "It raises interesting questions about the origins and the evolution of the universe."
The team dubbed the galaxy z8_GND_5296, it is believed to be about 30 billion light-years away. The Milky Way generates about one or two Sun-like stars a year; this galaxy seems to create about 300.
The galaxy was observed by the scientists as it looked 13 billion years ago, since that is the amount of time it took for its light to reach human eyes on Earth.
"Because of its distance we get a glimpse of conditions when the universe was only about 700 million years old - only [five] percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years," Texas A&M astrophysicist Casey Papovich, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and a member of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, said.
The researchers were able to determine z8_GND_5296's distance by measuring a feature of hydrogen called the Lyman alpha transition. The feature can be detected in almost all galaxies that popped up over one billion years after the big bang, but in anything older than that the hydrogen line gets increasingly more difficult to detect.
"We were thrilled to see this galaxy," Steven Finkelstein, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin said. "And then our next thought was, 'Why did we not see anything else? We're using the best instrument on the best telescope with the best galaxy sample. We had the best weather - it was gorgeous. And still, we only saw this emission line from one of our sample of 43 observed galaxies, when we expected to see around six. What's going on?'"
The galaxy is believed to be from a time when the universe was turning from an opaque state where most of the hydrogen was neutral to a translucent stage in which it was ionized.
"Everything seems to have changed since then," Tilvi said. "If it was neutral everywhere today, the night sky that we see wouldn't be as beautiful. What I'm working on is studying exactly why and exactly where this happened. Was this transition sudden, or was it gradual?"
