Hubble finds strong contender for galaxy distance record

A massive cluster of yellowish galaxies is seemingly caught in a spider’s web of eerily distorted background galaxies in the left-hand image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard... Click here for more information.

Detailed images from Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) reveal an infant galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, undergoing a firestorm of star birth as it comes out of the dark ages, a time shortly after the Big Bang, but before the first stars completed the reheating of the cold, dark Universe. Images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared Array Camera provided strong additional evidence that it was a young star-forming galaxy in the dark ages.

“We certainly were surprised to find such a bright young galaxy 13 billion years in the past”, said astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA and a member of the research team. “This is the most detailed look to date at an object so far back in time.”

According to the authors, the measurements are “highly reliable”. “This object is the strongest candidate for the most distant galaxy so far”, states team member Piero Rosati from ESO, Germany.

“The Hubble images yield insight into the galaxy’s structure that we cannot get with any other telescope,” added astronomer Rychard Bouwens of the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the co-discoverers of this galaxy.

The new images should offer insights into the formative years of galaxy birth and evolution and yield information on the types of objects that may have contributed to ending the dark ages. During its lifetime the Hubble telescope has peered ever farther back in time, viewing galaxies at successively younger stages of evolution. These snapshots have helped astronomers create a scrapbook of galaxies from infancy to adulthood. The new Hubble and Spitzer images of A1689-zD1 show a time when galaxies were in their infancy.