Astronomers discover farthest galaxy yet -13.1 billion light-years away

Edwin Hubble first discovered in 1929 that the light from objects in space appears shifted somewhat toward the red spectrum, thanks to an increase in wavelength, and that the further away the objects were, the more shift in the light occurred. Later work by other astronomers confirmed this as direct evidence our universe is expanding — kind of like a ballon being slowly filled with air — which eventually led to the development of the Big Bang theory.

Now a group of astronomers led by UC Santa Cruz and Yale University have discovered the farthest galaxy yet, an “exceptionally luminous” one 13.1 billion light years from Earth and with the highest redshift ever measured. The astronomers determined the galaxy’s exact distance using the Keck I 10-meter telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal by Pascal Oesch of Yale University and his colleagues.If you’re a regular reader of ExtremeTech, you may be familiar with the term redshift. Edwin Hubble first discovered in 1929 that the light from objects in space appears shifted somewhat toward the red spectrum, thanks to an increase in wavelength, and that the further away the objects were, the more shift in the light occurred. Later work by other astronomers confirmed this as direct evidence our universe is expanding — kind of like a ballon being slowly filled with air — which eventually led to the development of the Big Bang theory.

“Every confirmation adds another piece to the puzzle of how the first generations of galaxies formed in the early universe,” said Pieter van Dokkum, the Sol Goldman Family Professor of Astronomy and chair of Yale’s Department of Astronomy, in a statement. “Only the largest telescopes are powerful enough to reach to these large distances.”

EGS-zs8-1, the farthest galaxy yet confirmed, as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Oesch and I. Momcheva (Yale University), and the 3D-HST and HUDF09/XDF teams.

The galaxy is named EGS-zs8-1, and originally stood out in images taken with NASA’sHubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. The Keck Observatory’s 10-meter telescope hasMOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer For Infra-Red Exploration), an instrument that lets astronomers study multiple galaxies simultaneously. A major focus for astronomy over the next 10 years will be the measurement and study of galaxies at extreme distances like this one. In that distance and time period, roughly 670 million years after the Big Bang, the hydrogen between galaxies was just transitioning from a neutral state to an ionized state — and galaxies like EGS-zs8-1 were responsible for this reionization, according to Rychard Bouwens of Leiden Observatory and co-author of the study.

“One of the most dramatic discoveries from Hubble and Spitzer in recent years is the unexpected number of these very bright galaxies at early times close to when the first galaxies formed. We still don’t fully understand what they are and how they relate to the very numerous fainter galaxies,” said coauthor Garth Illingworth, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, in a separate statement from that university.

Soon, we’ll know even more. In 2018, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will let astronomers peer even further back in time, as well as examine incredibly distant galaxies like EGS-zs8-1 more closely — and hopefully revealing more details on its gas properties and emitted light.

Source:http://www.extremetech.com/