DHAKA: Astronomers have found the most distant galaxy yet, a discovery that pushes back scientists’ view of the universe to about 700 million years after it is thought to have come into existence.

Light from the galaxy, designated by scientists as z8_GND_5296, took about 13.1 billion years to reach the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, both of which detected the galaxy in infrared light.

‘We are learning so much about a region so far back in time it’s hard to comprehend,’ said lead researcher Steven Finkelstein, an assistant professor with the University of Texas at Austin, reports daily Hurriyet.

‘This galaxy we`re seeing is almost 13.1 billion years ago and so this was something like 8 billion years before our sun was even born and of course much longer after that until life came around.’

Surprisingly, out of a pool of 43 candidate distant galaxies, z8_GND_5296 was the only one that revealed the key chemical evidence needed to confirm its distance.

That left Finkelstein and colleagues wondering if they had uncovered a clue to a bigger mystery: How soon did light from the universe`s first stars and galaxies pierce an obscuring veil of hydrogen gas that existed early in its history?

Scientists believe that at some point, high-energy ultraviolet radiation from exploded stars split the intergalactic hydrogen atoms into electrons and protons. Once ionized, the hydrogen would be electrically conductive and no longer scatter light.

That may have happened about the time of z8_GND_5296’s existence.

BDST: 1516 HRS, OCT 24, 2013
RoR/JCK