London. (EFE). – A team of American astronomers has discovered the Galaxy farthest known , whose light was emitted when the Universe was only May 1 percent of its current age of 13,800 million years.
The galaxy, named z8-GND-5296 , dating back to when the result of the Big Bang universe was only 700 million years, “and what makes it unique compared to other similar discoveries is that its distance has been confirmed by a spectrograph, “said Bahram Mobasher astronomer at the University of California, one of the team members who published their findings Wednesday in the journal Nature .
The galaxy was detected among 43 candidates, using infrared images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and its distance was confirmed by observations with the sophisticated spectrograph MOSFIRE Keck Telescope in Hawaii.
Studying the first galaxies is difficult because when its light reaches Earth has shifted to the infrared part of the spectrum due to the expansion of the Universe, in a phenomenon called red shift (redshift).
Therefore, astronomers rely on increasingly sensitive spectrographs on telescopes located on Earth, capable of measuring the redshift of the light from the galaxy, which is proportional to their distance.
The team, led by Steven Finkelstein, University of Texas, and Dominik Riechers, Cornell University (New York), also noted that the new Galaxy has a formation rate stars “surprisingly high”, about 300 times a year the mass of our sun, compared to the Milky Way, which is only two to three stars per year.
“These discoveries provide clues to the birth of the universe and suggest areas that can host a star formation more intense than previously thought,” said the construction of telescopes Finkelstein.Con increasingly largest in Hawaii and Chile and James Webb telescope in space, at the end of this decade, astronomers hope to discover many more galaxies at even greater distances, as Mobasher.
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