NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope has released a photo of GN-z11, the farthest galaxy ever caught by human technology, resting a massive 13.4 billion light-years away from the Earth. The galaxy is located in the same direction as the Ursa Major constellation and is still in its infancy. Prior to the finding, the farthest that scientists had ever seen into space was 13.2 billion light-years.
In order to determine the distance of GN-z11, the team measured its redshift, which is the degree that the galaxy's light is altered by the universe's expansion. Higher redshifts mean the galaxy is more distant and low redshifts mean the galaxy is closer. Prior to GN-z11's record-breaking 11.1 redshift, the highest was 8.68 from the galaxy EGSY8p7.
The team was able to capture such a distant galaxy thanks to the precision of Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, allowing them to split the light from GN-z11 into its component colors.
GN-z11 existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang, which equates to around 13.3 billion years ago. Due to the long distances that light emitted from such a distant galaxy must travel, the image that we see captured by Hubble is actually what the galaxy looked like over 13 billion years ago.
"We've taken a major step back in time, beyond what we'd ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only 3 percent of its current age," said Pascal Oesch of Yale University, who acted as principal investigator of the study.
The data collected from the study reveals that GN-z11 is fairly small - around 25 times smaller than the Milky Way - but is growing rapidly and creating stars approximately 20 times faster than our galaxy. Not only is this increased rate of star formation the reason that we can see GN-z11, it also points to the rapid growth potential of the universe's early galaxies.
"It's amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form," said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon."
