It is the brightest galaxy ever found that dates back to
the early universe and a jewel to
astronomers.
What appears to be four
elongated arcs around a foreground object here is actually one ancient galaxy magnified through
gravitational lensing. The galaxy appears to
date back to just two billion years after the Big Bang.
"A telescope is an
astronomer's time machine," explained researcher Huan Lin, a member of the
team that discovered the galaxy at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory,
in a statement "The light from this galaxy took more than 11 billion years
to reach us."
Astronomers have set the
age of the universe at about 13.7
billion years old.
Lin and his colleagues were
part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to scan the night sky. Astronomers were
originally hunting for views of merging galaxies and sifted through some 70,000
images before finding this portal into the galactic past.
Team leader
Sahar Allam named this image the Eight o”Clock Arc after the time at which it
was taken. The galaxy here appears to be about 11.2 billion light-years from
Earth, and is not the first ancient object of its kind found by astronomers—more
than 1,000 faint ones have been identified—but is the brightest known.
-- Tariq Malik
Credit: Allam, SDSS-II collaboration.
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