 This is an artist's rendition of the newly discovered most distant galaxy z8_GND_5296. 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? 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. 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. “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. 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. That means galaxies become ever fainter as we push closer to the birth of the universe and the Big Bang. "We are at the point where we can study and understand how galaxies form, and we're going to find more distant ones, absolutely." "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. “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.
– 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.