NASA spots farthest galaxy, breaks cosmic distance record
.. a major step back in time.. a really huge galaxy formed only 200 or 300 million years after the supposed big bang?
“Our spectroscopic observations reveal the galaxy to be even further away than we had originally thought, right at the distance limit of what Hubble can observe,” Gabriel Brammer of the Space Telescope Science Institute and second author of the study said.
Previously, to estimate GN-z11’s distance astronomers had to analyze its color in images taken with both Hubble and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. Now the team has used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
GN-z11’s distance has a redshift of 11.1, which corresponds to 400 million years after the Big Bang, a distance that was believed only to be reachable with the next generation NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Until now, the most distant measured galaxy was EGSY8p7 with a redshift of 8.68, located 13.2 billion years in the past.
And this from observation:
“It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon,” explains Garth Illingworth of the University of California in Santa Cruz.