Oldest galaxy so far found through the Hubble Space Telescope by Zuzana Zelenakova

Matthew Lehnert of the Observatory of Paris in Meudon and his colleagues made a surprising discovery. They found the oldest galaxy so far through the Hubble Space Telescope´s Wide Field Camera 3. It was recognized on the photo released earlier this year. The distance between the most remote astronomical object known and Earth is 13.071 billion light-years. At the time of its creation the universe itself was only 600 million years old. "We're looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age," said California Institute of Technology astronomy professor Richard Ellis, who wasn't part of the discovery team. "In human terms, we're looking at a 4-year-old boy i! n the life span of an adult.“ The new galaxy doesn´t have a proper name, it is dubbed UDFy-38135539. However, Lehnert and his colleagues said they called it „the high red shift blob“. The astronomers learned the distance between the galaxy and our planet after 16 hours of observations with the spectrograph in Chile. At first, they feared it would take as long as one year to do the spectroscopy, however, Lehnert “calculated that the light emitted by hydrogen atoms in the galaxy was bright enough to do a shorter study”. The state in which the scientists see the galaxy now is about 100 million years old, that is because it takes the light so long to travel such enormous distance. The most thrilling fact about the discovery is for the astronomers that it confirms the theories about the time of birth of the first stars and galaxies. "We're looking almost to the edge, almost within 100 million years of seeing the very first objects," Ellis said! . "One hundred million years to a human seems an awful long ti! me, but in astronomical time periods, that's nothing compared to the life of the stars." The study was published in Nature, one of the world´s most prestigious scientific journals on October 21.

related story (sgx18458): http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101020/ap_on_sc/us_sci_oldest_g...

by Zuzana Zelenakova for Cantell TV (http://cantell.tv)

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