Scientists reportedly found the farthest galaxy yet and they say it is over 13 billion years old.
The Register reported that the newly discovered galaxy, called EGS8p7, is the most distant ever observed, and is 13.2 billion years old. The universe is known to be 13.8 billion years old. The findings were published in the latest issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters on August 28, 2015.
The information was gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope of NASA. Adi Zitrin, a NASA Hubble postdoctoral scholar in astronomy, and Richard Ellis, a professor of astrophysics at University College in London, performed a spectrographic analysis of the galaxy to determine its redshift, which will measure its distance.
Redshift comes from the Doppler effect, which actually involves stretched light among celestial beings. There is a change from the actual color to redder wavelengths which will show how far the galaxy is, Phys.org reported. The multi-object spectrometer for infrared exploration (MOSFIRE) at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii was used by the researchers. More investigation is needed to know more about the galaxy.
"If you look at the galaxies in the early universe, there is a lot of neutral hydrogen that is not transparent to this emission. We expect that most of the radiation from this galaxy would be absorbed by the hydrogen in the intervening space. Yet still we see Lyman-alpha from this galaxy,” Zitrin explained in a Caltech report.
Zitrin added that they are currently thoroughly calculating the accurate chances of finding EGS8p7 and seeing the emission from it to understand whether there is a need to change the timeline of the reionization, which is one of the main questions that will improve our understanding of the evolution of the universe.
Phys.org also wrote that after the Big Bang, the universe had several charged particles or electrons, protons and photons. The early universe could not transmit light because the photons were scattered by free electrons.
The universe later cooled after about 380,000 years, allowing protons and electrons to mix into neutral hydrogen atoms that filled the universe, letting light travel through the cosmos. The first galaxies activated and reionized the neutral gas after 500 million to 1 billion years. At present, the universe is still ionized.
The researchers reported that they detected the faint galaxy at a redshift of 8.68, which referred to a time when the universe was supposedly full of absorbing hydrogen clouds. The last farthest galaxy found had a redshift of 7.73.
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