An artist's rendition of the newly discovered galaxy z8_GND_5296, which despite its name is actually not a Windows registry entry.
(Credit: V. Tilvi, C. Papovich, S.L. Finkelstein and the Hubble Heritage Team)
Good news, road trip fans! Astronomers say they’ve spotted the most distant potential destination: a galaxy far, far away (road not included).
Led by University of Texas at Austin astronomer Steven Finkelstein, a team using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Keck I telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, has spotted and measured the stretch to what they claim is the most distant galaxy ever found by humans. The view astronomers got of galaxy z8_GND_5296 is as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang.
“We get a glimpse of conditions when the universe was only about 5 percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years,” team member Casey Papovich of Texas A&M University said in a statement.
Post a Comment