Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted it first. The W.M. Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea confirmed the results. The light coming from a tiny galaxy 13.5 billion light years away was not the most distant ever seen, but it was the oldest.
The distant galaxy in question appears to be quite mature – light emitted from it shows the spectra of fully formed and mature stars. It is the age of the galaxy that has physicists and astronomers scratching their heads: the Big Bang is theorized to have happened 13.7 billion years ago. The newly found galaxy appears to have formed just 200 thousand years after that. The galaxy is the oldest object, and conversely the youngest, spotted to date. Even though the thing is 13.5 billion years old, astronomers refer to it as young because it developed at the very beginning of the known universe, when all that we know and understand was young.
Mr. Einstein had an enormous hand in this discovery. Without his theory of gravitational lensing it would never have occurred.
According to Einstein a massive object can exert so much gravitational pull that it can actually bend light itself. Light rays are energetic particle streams whose courses are difficult to alter – it takes an epic amount of energy to bend their stream, and the stream in only bent.
A massive cluster of galaxies lies between Earth and the newly discovered ancient galaxy. The immense gravitational field surrounding the cluster not only bends but amplifies and focuses the light streaming from the galaxy, providing us with a perfectly accurate view that is eleven times brighter than it would normally appear.
This great leap in brightness allows scientists to study what would otherwise be obscured by the immense dark distance between us and this ancient, very young, and mature galaxy. Thank you, Mr. Einstein!
You can read more about the Hubble Space Telescope at NASA’s Hubble site.
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