Hubble reveals what appears to be the most distant star system. The young galaxy appears as a red blob. Click to enlarge the image. Photo Credit/NASA, Space Telescope Science Institute
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have spotted what appears to be one of the universe’s earliest galaxies.
The faint red blob is 13.2 billion light years away and 500 million times too faint to see with the human eye.
Experts now calculate the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years.
The discovery was made possible with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, an instrument installed in the space telescope by a visiting NASA shuttle crew in May 2009, The Hubble Space Telescope, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, was launched by shuttle astronauts in 1990.
A similar collaboration with ESA is producing Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which was designed for observations of even earlier galaxy formation.
This chart illustrates the strides made by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to reveal the mysteries of the distant universe. Click to enlarge the image. Image Credit/NASA
Late last year, NASA disclosed the James Webb is over budget, likely slowing its completion and launching until late this decade.
The previous record holder for observed star systems was 150 million light years closer.
“We’re peering into an era where big changes are afoot,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, one of a team of astronomers who published their findings in Nature, the British science journal. “The rapid rate at which the star birth is changing tells us if we go a little further back in time we’re going to see even more dramatic changes, closer to when the first galaxies were just starting to form.”
The newly discovered galaxy appears so small that is lacks the familiar spiral shape of the star systems more easily observed from the Earth. Hubble is unable to make out individual stars in the new discovery, but astronomers believe they are witnessing a compact glowing region of hot stars within primordial gas trapped inside a pocket of dark matter.
The image of the newly discovery distant faint object is part of what NASA calls the Hubble Ultra Deep Field-Infrared.
All of Hubble’s Deep Field images are some what like core samples drilled deep into the Antarctic to extract long shafts of ice. The layers of ice in the core sample hold clues to past climate change.
In this case, the Ultra Deep Field was taken with Hubble after a team of seven shuttle astronauts overhauled Hubble over 13 days in May 2009. It was a mission that NASA cancelled after the 2003 shuttle Columbia tragedy, then restored because of its scientific promise.
The exposures were taken in 2009 and 2010, and required a total of 111 orbits or 8 days of dedicated Hubble observing.
From past Hubble Deep Fields, it appears the spiral and elliptical galaxies we observe today evolved from clumps, perhaps like the space telescope’s newly announced discovery.
Astronomers agree the first 500 million years of the universe’s existence holds important clues as to how that process began.
“After 20 years of opening our eyes to the universe around us, Hubble continues to awe and surprise astronomers,” said Jon Morse, the director NASA’s Astrophysics Division in Washington. “It now offers a tantalizing look at the very edge of the known universe — a frontier NASA strives to explore