Next time you are outside late at night, point your eyes to the Big Dipper. The stars that form that constellation are between 80-200 light years from Earth. A mere stone’s throw on an intergalactic scale. But if you keep looking at it, past those stars, really hard, you will (won’t) see light from GN-z11, the oldest galaxy we’ve ever discovered.
Here, let this animation take you there. It’s much easier.
Out there, way way way way way way way way out there, is the farthest galaxy ever seen from space, on the absolute edges of the observable universe.
The light we are seeing from GN-z11 started traveling to us just 400 million years after the Big Bang occurred, which is 13.4 billion years ago.
That’s old AF.
“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” explained principal investigator Pascal Oesch of Yale University.
A map produced by NASA will show you just how long and deep into spacetime the telescope searched.
According to NASA, “the results reveal surprising new clues about the nature of the very early universe.”
“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,” explained investigator Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
And just wait until our new telescopes launch.
These findings provide a tantalizing preview of the observations that the James Webb Space Telescope will perform after it is launched into space in 2018. “Hubble and Spitzer are already reaching into Webb territory,” Oesch said.
“This new discovery shows that the Webb telescope will surely find many such young galaxies reaching back to when the first galaxies were forming,” added Illingworth.
Yeaaah buddy.