An international team of astronomers have broken a distance record. A cosmic distance record. They were able to use the Hubble Space Telescope to see all the way back, 13.4 billion years ago, and locate a bright young galaxy named GN-z11.
We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” explained principal investigator Pascal Oesch of Yale University. The team includes scientists from Yale University, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and the University of California.
Astronomers are closing in on the first galaxies that formed in the universe. The new Hubble observations take astronomers into a realm that was once thought to be only reachable with NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
A nice fun fact is that astronomers still use the “redshift” of a galaxy to aid them in determining the distance and speed of our expanding universe as well as specific galaxies.
Astronomers measure large distances by determining the “redshift” of a galaxy. This phenomenon is a result of the expansion of the universe; every distant object in the universe appears to be receding from us because its light is stretched to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels through expanding space to reach our telescopes. The greater the redshift, the farther the galaxy.
It is using the “redshift” that Edwin Hubble first was able to see the relationship between how galaxies were moving away from us, at a rate proportional to their distance from us.