© spacetelescope.org
Even though GN-z11 ‒ or, as scientists dubbed it, the "infant galaxy" ‒ is extremely faint, it is unusually bright for its remoteness from Earth.
Never before has the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope managed to reach as far as 400 million years after the Big Bang and precisely measure the distance to GN-z11. NASA says it has now broken "the cosmic distance record."
"We've taken a major step back in time, beyond what we'd ever expected to be able to do with Hubble," said Pascal Oesch of Yale University, the lead author of the paper about the find. "We managed to look back in time to measure the distance to a galaxy when the Universe was only three percent of its current age."
To reach that far, Hubble measured distance of GN-z11 from its spectrum by splitting the light into its component colors.
In order to determine large distances, astronomers measured what is known as "redshift," which means longer and "redder" wavelengths from when light of distant objects stretches as they recede from us. Hence, redshift appears as a result of the expansion of the Universe.
"Our spectroscopic observations reveal the galaxy to be even further away than we had originally thought, right at the distance limit of what Hubble can observe," Gabriel Brammer of the Space Telescope Science Institute and second author of the study said.
Previously, to estimate GN-z11's distance astronomers had to analyze its color in images taken with both Hubble and the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. Now the team has used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
GN-z11's distance has a redshift of 11.1, which corresponds to 400 million years after the Big Bang, a distance that was believed only to be reachable with the next generation NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Until now, the most distant measured galaxy was EGSY8p7 with a redshift of 8.68, located 13.2 billion years in the past.
"It's amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon," explains Garth Illingworth of the University of California in Santa Cruz.
As NASA's findings show, GN-z11 is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way, but it is forming stars at a rate about 20 times greater than our galaxy.
Reader Comments
But maybe they would not have such hubris. Maybe they would embrace a Steady State theory recognizing that the Universe is infinite and perpetual, with beginnings and endings being local events whereas, overall, nothing fundamentally changes.
A large forest is a good analogy, because even though trees die eventually (like stars) they are constantly replaced and nothing changes overall. Individual trees, other vegetation and animals age and die, but the forest overall has no "age" - OK the analogy partly breaks down in that, say, the Amazon Forest hasn't always been there, but compared with a single human life, it "always" has and probably compared with all of human existence of, say, 250,000 years. So it is effectively "timeless" and ageless.
As you might gather I am a Steady Stater and I reject "Big Bang" and all that goes with it, including most of Einstein (except when he deals with acceleration, which produces a gravity-like effect) and I especially reject Stephen Hawking's wild flights of fancy ... well neither Einstein nor Hawking were/are physicists nor scientists in any way (scientists test hypotheses with experiments). No they both were/are just theoretical mathematicians and cosmologists with impossible to test hypotheses.
It is years ago that I thought all this through and it would take something approaching small book length and it would have to include some maths, which I have forgotten, so I'll cease now - but answer any questions if I can and if the questioner is not a "true believer" determined to convince me of the status quo. I'm not interested in convincing anyone of anything, but if my meditations ring any bells, then fine.
Again.
... right at the distance limit of what Hubble can observe
Again.
So how did we get to be at least 13.4 billions light years away in the first place?
I suppose you could come up with some fantasy about sudden inflation but the story lacks credibility
You are awesome.
Perhaps if I hadn't, then I might have published something long ago, instead of just commenting here at the age of 72.
Then again, if I'd felt important - and at the centre of things - I doubt that I would have queried the status quo, which heavily relies on both ego and geo centricity to promulgate many theories, attitudes, beliefs and so on - if you get my drift.
For example: I admire Kant in many ways, but his "categorical imperative" of "duty" did not come from nowhere.
He was remarkable in that he never left Konisburg and, so 'tis said, people could set their clocks by him as he walked to the university, i.e. he was a very duty-bound person.
Kant is somewhat relevant to discussion because of the Kant-Laplace Theory, which goes roughly like this as I recall:
Our present solar system probably formed from the debris of an earlier star, which coalesced as another star (our Sun) and the planets from hydrogen, other gasses and elements formed in the earlier - probably - more massive star.
I may have added stuff gleaned from other sources, but this'll do anyway and it fits well with Steady State Theory.
Eventually, so it's commonly supposed, our solar system will terminate and get recycled.
Kinda all fits with religious dogma about "world without end' and an eternal god, but for me it takes science, for instance, to add details to intuitions.
NASA is just another cogwheel mainstream pseudo-science belonging to the matrix control system so I dont believe them anymore. Also there are so many cases where they are censoring pictures and films of space who have UFOs on them,nasa censoring them out of the pictures and films.Theyre silencing and threatening astronauts who want to talk about UFO.
Theyre(nasa) always denying UFOs.
Even if there are things that nasa shares to public that are partially not 100% false,you can bet,as long as it is given to the public,you can bet its absolutely insignificant.