Discovery of a more distant galaxy than any experienced! – Point

While its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to be a hundred times more powerful, is currently being built, the old Hubble, which recently passed the twenty-five years service (see our slideshow), has once again prove that he was far from good for sensitive. With it, an international team of astronomers has indeed recently managed to flush out the oldest galaxies – and thus also the farthest – known so far. Which has been provisionally named the barbarous name of GN-z11.

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Aged 13.4 billion years old and located in the background of the famous constellation of Ursa Major, it is thus discovered on the plate Hubble, as it was only 400 million years after the Big Bang. She and sprayed the previous record established with EGSY8p7 galaxy old of 13.2 billion light years. Jumped back to 200 million years brings us in infancy of the Universe, relatively soon after the first stars to be formed around 200 to 300 million years after the Big Bang.

WATCH this video to virtually walk in space and time, up to GN-z11:

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to date the cosmic objects such as this galaxy, scientists are based on the characteristics of the light we receive from them. The movement of a light source which moves away from an observer causes an increase in the wavelength of the collected light, resulting in a red shift. A “redshift” even stronger than the light source moves fast. Now, in an expanding universe like ours, the most distant objects are also those who are far faster. Thus, the more a celestial object observed sends us a reddish light, the more it is old. In the case of interest here, the galaxy EGSY8p7 posted a “redshift” of 8.68, against 11.1 GN-z11.

As for the specifics of the new find, apart from its distance and age, little is known at this stage obviously fairly. The researchers, who publish their findings on Tuesday in the Astrophysical Journal, believe it is about 25 times smaller than our galaxy and its mass is about one billion against Sun over 200 billion to our Milky Way. However, researchers say they are extremely surprised to find a galaxy containing so many stars already at a remote epoch. It would produce twenty times more than our galaxy today.

“It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive could exist only 200 to 300 million years after the first stars began to form, “says Garth Illingworth of the University of California, a co-author of the study. For researchers, such bright galaxies should not exist at that time. And yet … The James Webb came into service, scheduled for 2018, will no doubt, going back even further – and more accurately – in time, to elucidate this enigma

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