30 October 2013
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This image shows a newly discovered galaxy, z8_GND_5296, whose distance calculation showed it to be the farthest known galaxy in the universe. z8_GND_5296, lying at an immensely large distance of 30 billion light years, glows as tiny reddish speck, enlarged in the green frame, above image center. The image was obtained from Earth orbit, by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Credit: NASA, ESA, V. Tilvi (Texas A&M University), S. Finkelstein (University of Texas, Austin), and C. Papovich (Texas A&M University)
Using data obtained by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and observations made with a giant Earth-based telescope, a team of astronomers has discovered and measured the distance to an extremely distant galaxy, located about 30 billion light years away from Earth. This galaxy, known technically as z8_GND_5296, now holds the record of the most distant known galaxy.
(The light year is a unit of measuring astronomical distances. It is the distance light travels in one year, approximately 10,000 billion km. The speed of light in vacuum is nearly 300,000 km/s.)
z8_GND_5296 is so remote that it appears as it was in a very early period of the universe’s history, when the universe was 700 million old, or 5% of its age, according to modern theories. Modern astronomy has revealed that the universe formed about 14 billion years ago, and it is now over 90 billion light years across.
References
Hubble Site
http://hubblesite.org/
Wikipedia
Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist