text: View Images Astronomers have found a galaxy far, far away—13.1 billion light-years from Earth, to be exact. 
   
   Photograph by V. Tilvi (Texas A&M), S. Finkelstein (UT Austin), the CANDELS Team, and HST/NASA 
   
   Astronomers have found a galaxy 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, making it officially the most distant object ever detected. 
   
   A faint, infrared speck of light from this ancient galaxy, called z8_GND_5296, was spotted using the Hubble Space Telescope and one of the world's largest ground-based telescopes, a ten-meter telescope at Keck Observatory at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. 
   
   Light from this baby galaxy began its journey when the universe was about 700 million years old and just emerging from the cosmic mist left over from its birth, said Casey Papovich, one of the lead authors of the study and an astronomer at Texas A&M University in College Station. 
   
   The former record holder is a fellow youngster, an ultra-faint galaxy about 100 million light-years closer to Earth. 
   
   Past claims of galaxies at these extreme distances were mined from deep field images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But many of these would-be candidates turned out to be much closer than previously thought, according to Papovich. 
   
   "Some of our candidates have turned out to be very cold stars—brown dwarfs—in our own galaxy," he explained. 
   
   Redshift Reveals 
   
   The only way to confirm a galaxy's true distance, however, is to do follow-up measurements analyzing the spectrum of light emitted. This can enable astronomers to determine a candidate's redshift—how far its light is shifted into the red part of the spectrum—and thereby its distance. 
   
   Redshift occurs because wavelengths of light stretch out as galaxies move away from observers on Earth. So the higher the redshift number, the more distant the object from Earth. 
   
   Papovich's team found this faint galaxy's redshift was 7.5, compared with the previous record holder's 7.2. 
   
   "Until you have a redshift, there is always some doubt about the exact nature of the galaxy," said Papovich. 
   
   "All the other objects out there with claimed 'most distant galaxy' in their titles are candidates selected using only imaging, and no spectroscopic confirmation like what we have done here." 
   
   The find, described in a study published this week in the journal Nature, is expected to help researchers better understand the so-called era of reionization, when newborn hot, massive stars and their galaxies transformed the opaque hydrogen fog—which filled the cosmos in the first billion years after the Big Bang—into the transparent intergalactic space we see today. 
   
   "The galaxies themselves [in this era of the universe] would be filled with the newly formed, massive stars, many of which could be a thousand times the mass of our own sun," Papovich explained. 
   
   "We have yet to identify any conclusive evidence that these 'first-generation' stars exist in even this distant galaxy." 
   
   How Far Back Can We Go? 
   
   Can we push the record back even further, closer to the Big Bang? 
   
   Richard Ellis, an astronomer not connected to the study, says it is definitely possible. But we do not yet have telescopes powerful enough to do the job. 
   
   "We have the capability, in principle, to push to redshifts of ten and beyond, corresponding to a time when the universe was only 350 million years old, or only 3 percent of its present age," said Ellis, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. 
   
   The conundrum for researchers is that looking at larger distances means looking further back in time. That means galaxies become ever fainter as we push closer to the birth of the universe and the Big Bang. 
   
   "For most of the early galaxies being seen by Hubble, there's little hope of confirming their distances with spectroscopy until we get powerful new facilities such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope," said Ellis. 
   
   "Ultimately, to chart the universe in detail at these early times, we need the next-generation facilities." ||||| An artist's rendition of the newly discovered galaxy z8_GND_5296. The galaxy looks red in the actual Hubble Space Telescope image because the collective blue light gets shifted due to the expansion of the universe and its large distance from Earth. (V. Tilvi/S.L. Finkelstein/ C. Papovich/Hubble Heritage Team) 
   
   Scientists have discovered the most distant galaxy ever confirmed, whose light took just over 13 billion years to reach Earth, providing a snapshot of the early universe. The faraway system resides in the night sky just above the handle of the Big Dipper. 
   
   One curious trait about the record-breaker is that it forms stars at an incredible rate, about 330 per year — more than a hundred times faster than our Milky Way galaxy. This could be a trademark of the universe’s early days, when hydrogen gas for star formation was much more plentiful. 
   
   “We wanted to figure out how galaxies evolve,” said Steven Finkelstein, lead author and University of Texas at Austin astronomer. “One way to do that is to push back deeper and deeper into the history of the universe.” The study was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature. 
   
   At first, the landmark discovery was a little bit of a let-down, the scientists said. 
   
   The team of astronomers used images from the Hubble Space Telescope to identify 43 possible faraway galaxies and then used state-of-the-art spectrographic equipment at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to confirm their distances. In the end, Finkelstein and his colleagues could only retrieve data from this lone galaxy. 
   
   1 of 71 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The year in space View Photos In 2013, scientists captured stunning images of the planets, a galaxy, a planetary nebula and more from space. Caption Over the past 12 months, scientists have captured stunning images of the planets, a galaxy, a planetary nebula and more from space. This composite image provided by NASA shows before and after images taken by the Opportunity rover. At left is an image of a patch of ground taken on Dec. 26, 2013. At right is in image taken on Jan. 8, 2014 showing a rock shaped like a jelly doughnut that had not been there before. The space agency said the rover Opportunity likely kicked up the rock into its field of view. Opportunity landed on Mars in 2004 and continues to explore. NASA/AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
   
   “We were first excited, then a little disappointed because we only saw one, and then excited again,” he said. “We would have hoped for some number bigger than one.” 
   
   With advances in instrumentation technology, astronomers continue to stretch their detection capabilities further outward from the Milky Way. Because light takes time to travel such long distances, remote objects allow them to peer back through time. 
   
   Take the sun as a simple example, said study author and Texas A&M University astronomer Vithal Tilvi. Sunlight takes a little over eight minutes to reach Earth. 
   
   “That means that when we are looking at the sun, we are actually looking at the sun as it was eight minutes ago,” he said. 
   
   In comparison, the light detected from this outlying galaxy — with the official catalogue name z8_GND_5296 — left the galaxy 13.1 billion years ago. This gives us a glimpse of the universe as it was when it was only 700 million years old. 
   
   In other words, we’re looking 95 percent of the way back to the Big Bang. To put that into human terms, that would be like an 80-year-old watching a video of himself on his fourth birthday. 
   
   “From observing these distant galaxies, we can understand how the universe was when it was very young,” Tilvi said. “There’s no other way to look into the past.” 
   
   1 of 14 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Kepler mission discoveries View Photos Here’s a look back at some of the space telescope’s discoveries. Caption Here’s a look back at some of the space telescope’s discoveries. The newly discovered "mega-Earth" Kepler-10c appears in the foreground of this artist's illustration. Its sibling in red, the lava world Kepler-10b, is in the background. Both orbit a sunlike star. Kepler-10c has a diameter of about 18,000 miles, 2.3 times as large as Earth, and weighs 17 times as much. Comprised of all solids, it may possess a thin atmosphere shown here as wispy clouds. David A. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
   
   Setting out to find the most distant galaxy isn’t a single eureka moment, but rather a careful process of confirmation and remeasurement. Further-away galaxies than z8_GND_5296 have been identified but failed a double-check process along the way. 
   
   The team first perused a month’s worth of images from the Hubble telescope for possible candidate galaxies. Hubble avoids the snags that Earth-bound telescopes can run into, such as clouds and bad weather, to more easily spot the red blobs that signal a distant object. 
   
   The same effect that causes a passing ambulance siren to change pitch as it zooms by, called the Doppler shift, makes the most distant galaxies appear red. Because the universe is expanding, the galaxy’s light moves away from us and gets stretched into a redder wavelength. 
   
   “These galaxies from within the first billion years of the universe are so far away that they have shifted into the infrared, or redder than our eyes can see,” Finkelstein said. 
   
   How red the light of the object is gives some sense of how far away it is, but a technique called spectroscopy is the true litmus test that accurately confirms the distance. The researchers spent two days at the Keck Observatory, near the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano, looking for a characteristic piece of data called the Lyman-alpha emission line. 
   
   The Lyman-alpha line tends to be a bright signature of old-universe galaxies that are forming stars at a high rate. Once found for a particular galaxy, an exact distance from Earth can be calculated. 
   
   Although disappointing at first, finding only one Lyman-alpha line is an intriguing discovery, the scientists say. 
   
   One theory says that, after cooling down from the Big Bang, a cosmic fog of neutral hydrogen gas cloaked our early universe. 
   
   “That was the case until the very first galaxies lit up,” said Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who was not involved in the study. “They produced the ultraviolet radiation that broke up hydrogen.” 
   
   Gradually, the universe started a “reionization” process — first with bubbles of ionization around individual stars, then dwarf galaxies. As those young galaxies grew in size and overlapped, they formed larger regions of ionization that eventually became today’s fully ionized universe. 
   
   “Perhaps we are seeing the evidence that it ended right around this galaxy,” Loeb said, and this one happened to peek through the fog where the other 42 candidates could not. 
   
   Loeb also believes the unusually high star-formation rate may have to be reconfirmed. Although there are other galaxies that birth hundreds of stars per year, they are often quite massive, while z8_GND_5296 is considered a dwarf galaxy. 
   
   “It’s not unusual to find small galaxies at those early times, but finding such a small galaxy making so many stars at once is unusual,” he said. 
   
   Kim is a freelance science writer based in Philadelphia. ||||| This is an artist's rendition of the newly discovered most distant galaxy z8_GND_5296. (The galaxy looks red in the actual Hubble Space Telescope image because the collective blue light from stars gets shifted toward redder colors due to the expansion of the universe and its large distance from Earth.) / NASA, C. Papovich,V. Tilvi, A. Aloisi, The Hubble Heritage, ESA, S.L. Finkelstein, and AURA., HST, STScI 
   
   Discovering and studying distant galaxies allows astronomers to develop a better understanding of how the universe formed. The further the distance, the older the galaxy, and the more insight it offers. 
   
   Now, researchers are even closer to locating the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, the colossal event that created the universe about 13.8 billion years ago. 
   
   In a study published Oct. 24 in the journal Nature, astronomers from the University of California at Riverside explain that they've discovered the most distant -- and therefore oldest -- galaxy yet. 
   
   A decade of incredible photos from Spitzer Space Telescope 
   
   This year's best space images (pictures) 
   
   Galaxy z8_GND_5296 formed 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just 5 percent of its current age. The galaxy is producing stars extremely rapidly, much more rapidly than the Milky Way. This is consistent with other galaxies that formed within one billion years of the Big Bang. 
   
   In a joint effort between the University of California at Riverside, University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M; University and the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, astronomers sorted through Hubble Space Telescope images of more than 100,000 galaxies. Based on color, they selected 43 candidates to study further. 
   
   "The most reliable way to select galaxies is to use the color because the further out you go in the universe, galaxies get redder and redder," UC Riverside's Bahram Mobasher explained to CBSNews.com. "So, that is an indication of the distance." The color shifts as a galaxy expands over time. 
   
   Simply looking at red color is not enough to verify that a galaxy is the furthest away. Dust in the atmosphere will turn a galaxy red, Mobasher explained, so a nearby yet dusty galaxy will falsely appear to be distant. An abundance of heavy elements will also lead to a deeper red hue. 
   
   To account for these potential fallacies, the team next examined the candidate galaxies using spectroscopy using the Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration (MOSFIRE) instrument on the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. 
   
   "The MOSFIRE gives us a unique opportunity to study distant galaxies whose light shifts to the infrared," said Mobashar. "That confirmed the redshift, the velocity of the galaxy." 
   
   Spectroscopy measures the change in the wavelengths of a galaxy's light as it travels towards Earth, specifically how much it shifts towards the red end of the spectrum. This expansion velocity is called "redshift." Because redshift and galaxy distance are proportional, astronomers use redshift to determine distance. 
   
   The MOSFIRE instrument is able to detect infrared light in multiple objects at the same time, which allowed the astronomers to study all 43 candidates in just two nights. 
   
   They specifically looked at the Lyman alpha transition, a measurement of hydrogen emission, to see when the galaxy transitioned from an opaque state (when most of the hydrogen is neutral) to a translucent state (when the hydrogen is ionized). 
   
   The Lyman alpha transition is present in most galaxies that formed more than one billion years after the Big Bang. Detecting it in older galaxies is difficult, but that doesn't mean the galaxies don't exist, explained co-author Naveen Reddy of UC Riverside. 
   
   "The difficulty of detecting the hydrogen emission line does not mean that the galaxies are absent," Reddy said in a statement. "It could be that they are hidden from detection behind a wall of neutral hydrogen." 
   
   In this galaxy, the redshift measured 7.5. This beats the former distance record of 7.2. 
   
   The team will return to the Keck telescope in November and December to examine other galaxies. 
   
   "This is just an absolutely exciting time for doing this type of research," Mobashar added, "because the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck telescope, they compliment each other and pave the way for finding more and more of these distant galaxies. By looking, we essentially look back in time. The further away we look, further back in time we look. 
   
   "We are at the point where we can study and understand how galaxies form, and we're going to find more distant ones, absolutely." 
   
   Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:41 p.m. ET to reflect that the galaxy formed 700 million years after the Big Bang. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Rebecca Morelle: "We are talking about the most distant confirmed galaxy in the universe" 
   
   An international team of astronomers has detected the most distant galaxy yet. 
   
   The galaxy is about 30 billion light-years away and is helping scientists shed light on the period that immediately followed the Big Bang. 
   
   It was found using the Hubble Space Telescope and its distance was then confirmed with the ground-based Keck Observatory in Hawaii. 
   
   The study is published in the journal Nature. 
   
   Because it takes light so long to travel from the outer edge of the Universe to us, the galaxy appears as it was 13.1 billion years ago (its distance from Earth of 30 billion light-years is because the Universe is expanding). 
   
   Lead researcher Steven Finkelstein, from the University of Texas at Austin, US, said: "This is the most distant galaxy we've confirmed. We are seeing this galaxy as it was 700 million years after the Big Bang." 
   
   The far-off galaxy goes by the catchy name of z8_GND_5296. 
   
   Astronomers were able to measure how far it was from Earth by analysing its colour. 
   
   Because the Universe is expanding and everything is moving away from us, light waves are stretched. This makes objects look redder than they actually are. 
   
   Astronomers rate this apparent colour-change on a scale that is called redshift. 
   
   They found that this galaxy has a redshift of 7.51, beating the previous record-holder, which had a redshift of 7.21. 
   
   This makes it the most distant galaxy ever found. 
   
   Image caption z8_GND_5296 is churning out stars at a remarkable rate, say astronomers 
   
   The system is small: about 1-2% the mass of the Milky Way and is rich in heavier elements. 
   
   But it has a surprising feature: it is turning gas and dust into new stars at a remarkable rate, churning them out hundreds of times faster than our own galaxy can. 
   
   It is the second far-flung galaxy known that has been found to have a high star-production rate. 
   
   Seeing into space Human eyes can see long distances, but the further away an object gets the harder it is to see in detail 
   
   Telescopes make a distant object appear larger by collecting its light and focusing it to a point 
   
   The large reflecting Hubble Telescope creates images from the Universe's visible light and can also detect infrared and ultraviolet radiation 
   
   The optical and infrared Keck Telescopes examine young stars and can look into the centre of galaxies How do telescopes let us see so far into space? How do we know the Big Bang happened? 
   
   Prof Finkelstein said: "One very interesting way to learn about the Universe is to study these outliers and that tells us something about what sort of physical processes are dominating galaxy formation and galaxy evolution. 
   
   "What was great about this galaxy is not only is it so distant, it is also pretty exceptional." 
   
   He added that in the coming years, astronomers are likely to discover even more distant galaxies when Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is launched and other ground-based telescopes come online. 
   
   Commenting on the research, Dr Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, told BBC News: "This, along with some other evidence, shows that there are already quite surprisingly evolved galaxies in the very early Universe . 
   
   "This high star-formation rate maybe is a clue as to why these galaxies can form so quickly." 
   
   Prof Alfonso Aragon-Salamanca, from the University of Nottingham, added: "This is an important step forward, but we need to continue looking for more. 
   
   "The further away we go, the closer we will get to discovering the very first stars that ever formed in the Universe. The next generation of telescopes will make this possible." 
   
   But Dr Stephen Serjeant from the Open University said: "Chasing ultra-high redshift galaxies is a very exciting but equally very difficult game, and many claims of extremely distant galaxies have since turned out to be more nearby interlopers."
target: – Residents of the Milky Way, meet z8_GND_5296. That's the not-so-great name of a newly discovered galaxy that just happens to be the most distant—and thus oldest—ever spotted, reports CBS News. Scientists say it formed a mere 700 million years after the Big Bang, and it could shed further light on how the universe came to be. The BBC adds this little mind-bender: "Because it takes light so long to travel from the outer edge of the universe to us, the galaxy appears as it was 13.1 billion years ago." Not mind-bending enough? Try this from the Washington Post: "We’re looking 95 percent of the way back to the Big Bang. To put that into human terms, that would be like an 80-year-old watching a video of himself on his fourth birthday." The discovery comes courtesy of images taken by the Hubble Telescope and follow-up analysis by astronomers at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. One weird quirk of the galaxy: It produces stars at a much faster clip than our own, a trait that might have been more typical in the early days of the universe. So can we go even further back? In principle, yes, explains National Geographic, but we'll need bigger telescopes.