A Brief Glimpse Of The Farthest Galaxy Ever Seen


A glimpse of the farthest galaxy ever was seen with the conjoined ability of NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, in addition to the cosmic magnification effect.

Besides the research strides on Mars this year, this may be one of NASA’s biggest developments.

NASA proposes the farthest galaxy is 13.7-billion-years-old. The light that was captured from the orbiting observatories was a mere 500-million-years-old.

It is suggested that these images will give astrophysicists a peek into one of the least-known eras of the galaxy which is being called the cosmic dark ages.

According to SPACE.com , with the launch of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotrophy Probe (WMAP) which enabled cosmologists to study conditions as they were in the early universe, the age of the galaxy was determined in 2001.

“During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies,” NASA reported.

It is difficult to determine much about the early, far galaxies because only a small fraction of the light is captured. The starlight the telescopes captured came from the galaxy when the universe was only 3.6 percent of it’s current age.

Researchers are using what are called gravitational lenses, which are magnifying lenses that Fox News says resulted from “the warped fabric of reality.”

NASA reported:

“This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” said Wei Zheng, a principal research scientist in the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who is lead author of a new paper appearing in Nature. “Future work involving this galaxy, as well as others like it that we hope to find, will allow us to study the universe’s earliest objects and how the dark ages ended.”

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