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The most distant galaxy ever detected. It's called MACS 1149-JD and it's .... 13.2 billion light-years away
That's really far away.
http://phys.org/news/2012-09-astrophysicists-spy-ultra-distant-galaxy-cosmic.html
It was really hard to detect it, say thanks to gravitational lensing and strongest telescopes, but unlike previous detections of galaxy candidates in this age range, which were only glimpsed in a single color, this newfound galaxy has been seen in five different wavebands.
Totally unrelated: btw the oldest object, a star called HE 1523-0901 which is 13.2 billion years old located only 7500 ly from Earth.
And one of the oldest globular clusters is M15, located in the constellation Pegasus (~ 35000 ly away). It's 12 billion years old.
In the big image at left, the many galaxies of a massive cluster called MACS J1149+2223 dominate the scene. Gravitational lensing by the giant cluster brightened the light from the newfound galaxy, known as MACS 1149-JD, some 15 times. At upper right, a partial zoom-in shows MACS 1149-JD in more detail, and a deeper zoom appears to the lower right. Light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching NASA's telescopes. The galaxy has a redshift, or "z," of 9.6.
That's really far away.
http://phys.org/news/2012-09-astrophysicists-spy-ultra-distant-galaxy-cosmic.html
The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called "Dark Ages." During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. These first galaxies likely played the dominant role in the epoch of reionization, the event that signaled the demise of the universe's Dark Ages. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, neutral hydrogen gas formed from cooling particles. The first luminous stars and their host galaxies, however, did not emerge until a few hundred million years later. The energy released by these earliest galaxies is thought to have caused the neutral hydrogen strewn throughout the universe to ionize, or lose an electron, the state in which the gas has remained since that time.
It was really hard to detect it, say thanks to gravitational lensing and strongest telescopes, but unlike previous detections of galaxy candidates in this age range, which were only glimpsed in a single color, this newfound galaxy has been seen in five different wavebands.
Objects at these extreme distances are mostly beyond the detection sensitivity of today's largest telescopes. To catch sight of these early, distant galaxies, astronomers rely on "gravitational lensing". In this phenomenon - predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago - the gravity of foreground objects warps and magnifies the light from background objects. A massive galaxy cluster situated between our galaxy and the early galaxy magnified the latter's light, brightening the remote object some 15 times and bringing it into view. Based on the Spitzer and Hubble observations, astronomers think the distant galaxy was spied at a time when it was less than 200 million years old. It also is small and compact, containing only about 1% of the Milky Way's mass. According to leading cosmological theories, the first galaxies should indeed have started out tiny. They then progressively merged, eventually accumulating into the sizable galaxies of the more modern universe.
Totally unrelated: btw the oldest object, a star called HE 1523-0901 which is 13.2 billion years old located only 7500 ly from Earth.
And one of the oldest globular clusters is M15, located in the constellation Pegasus (~ 35000 ly away). It's 12 billion years old.
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