Scientists are saying they have discovered the most distant galaxy to date.
The galaxy, which has been given the name EGS-zs8-1, is considered one of the earliest galaxies known to exist in the universe,
The New York Times reported.
It was spotted by scientists at Yale University and University of California, Santa Cruz, with three telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, and was reported in
The Astrophysical Journal in an article by Pascal Oesch of Yale.
The light from the luminous EGS-zs8-1 took about 13 billion years to travel to Earth. The universe is estimated to be about 13.8 billion years old, according to
Astronomy Magazine.
Oesch said that this newly discovered galaxy had stars forming about 670 million years after the big bang.
"It has already built more than 15 percent of the mass of our own Milky Way today," Oesch told the Yale News. "But it had only 670 million years to do so. The universe was still very young then."
Its discovery was helped by the fact that it was one of the brightest objects of the early universe.
The launch of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in 2018 is supposed to help scientists learn even more about EGS-zs8-1, said
Garth Illingworth, a UC Santa Cruz scientist and co-author of the journal article, according to a statement from the university.
"Our current observations indicate that it will be very easy to measure accurate distances to these distant galaxies in the future with the James Webb Space Telescope," Illingworth said. "The result of JWST's upcoming measurements will provide a much more complete picture of the formation of galaxies at the cosmic dawn."
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