New Discovery...

Youngest ever galaxy discovered

A1689-zD1 Formed 700 Million Years After Our Universe Began, Say Astronomers

New York: Astronomers have discovered a galaxy which they claim is one of the youngest and brightest ever seen right after the cosmic “dark ages”, just 700 million years after the beginning of our Universe.
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the image of the infant galaxy with a redshift significantly above 7, using a natural zoom lens, the Nasa said.
In fact, the image reveals the galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, undergoing a firestorm of star birth as it comes out of the “dark ages”, a time shortly after the Big Bang, but before the first stars completed reheating of the Universe. “This galaxy presumably is one of the many galaxies that helped end the dark ages,” said lead astronomer Larry Bradley of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Added fellow researcher Garth Illingworth of the California University, “We’re certainly surprised to find such a bright young galaxy 13 billion years in the past. This is the most detailed look to date at an object so far.”
According to the astronomers, the measurements are “highly reliable”. “This object is the strongest candidate for the most distant galaxy so far,” said team member Piero Rosati from ESO in Germany. They hope that new images will offer insights into the formative years of galaxy birth and evolution and yield information on the types of objects that may have contributed to ending the dark ages.
In fact, the galaxy is so far away it did not appear in visible light images taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, because its light is stretched to infrared wavelengths by the Universe’s expansion. It took Hubble’s NICMOS, Spitzer and a trick of nature called gravitational lensing to see the faraway galaxy.
The astronomers used a relatively nearby massive cluster of galaxies known as Abell 1689, roughly 2.2 billion light-years away, to magnify the light from the more distant galaxy directly behind it. This natural telescope is actually gravitational lens. “The Hubble images yield insight into the galaxy’s structure that we cannot get with any other telescope,” said Rychard Bouwens of the University of California, and one of the co-discoverers of the galaxy. PTI

SHINING STARLETS: The Hubble Space telescope image of the infant galaxy A1689-zD1