Friday, October 25, 2013

Discovery of the oldest known galaxy so far - TF1

The most distant galaxy ever observed in the Universe. class=”title SZ11 c7″> The most distant galaxy ever observed in the Universe. / Credits: NASA / ESA / H. Ebeling (University of Hawaii)

His code name is z8_GND_5296. This series of letters and numbers means the most distant galaxy ever observed in the Universe. The discovery of this galaxy is recounted in an article published this week in the journal Nature, a first report is already available in English. Its light has taken about 13.1 billion years to reach Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. This allows to extend the observation of the universe 700 million years after the birth of the Universe.
Astronomers led to the discovery explain that this galaxy is about billion times more massive than the sun. It has two unusual characteristics that could explain why it is brighter and therefore more visible than other galaxies. It not only generates stars at a very rapid pace, about 100 times higher than our galaxy, the Milky Way. But it contains a very high percentage of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium by nuclear fusion inside stars.

launch the successor to Hubble in 2018

So scientists think that the galaxy may contain the remains from the explosion of many massive stars or while it is formed in a region of space which was littered with the remains of a previous generation of stars. “It could be that this galaxy is in a surdense region (ionized hydrogen), so that we see (…) but it is a part of the conjecture. For what we know, other galaxies are much more hydrogen gas inside the galaxies themselves and that is why we can not see, “said Steven Finkelstein, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

For more details on z8_GND_5296, it will probably wait for the activation of the successor to Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled for launch in 2018.

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