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Scientists discover the oldest, most distant galaxy till date

Scientists discover the oldest, most distant galaxy till date

Farthest and oldest galaxy ever observed

Astronomers have peered out into the vast expanse and discovered what they believe is the oldest, most distant galaxy till date.

Called GN-z11, the galaxy is13.4 billion light-years or 134 nonillion kilometers away from us.

The galaxy has been discovered by an international team of astronomers led by Nobunari Kashikawa, a professor at the department of astronomy at the University of Tokyo.

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Kashikawa said“From previous studies, the galaxy GN-z11 seems to be the farthest detectable galaxy from us, at 13.4 billion light years, or 134 nonillion kilometers (that’s 134 followed by 30 zeros). But measuring and verifying such a distance is not an easy task.”

“We looked at ultraviolet light specifically, as that is the area of the electromagnetic spectrum we expected to find the redshifted chemical signatures,” said Kashikawa. “The Hubble Space Telescope detected the signature multiple times in the spectrum of GN-z11. However, even the Hubble cannot resolve ultraviolet emission lines to the degree we needed. So we turned to a more up-to-date ground-based spectrograph, an instrument to measure emission lines, called MOSFIRE, which is mounted to the Keck I telescope in Hawaii.”

The MOSFIRE captured the emission lines from GN-z11 in detail, which allowed the team to make a much better estimation on its distance than was possible from previous data.

As perthe most widely accepted cosmological models, the Universe began with a BangBang almost 13.8 billion years ago. The Cosmic Dark Ages began 370 thousand years after this and continued for another 1 billion years.

At this time, the only light sources were the photons released before Cosmic Microwave Background or those released by neutral nitrogen atoms. The shifting of light of the photons due tothe expansion of the Universe is called the redshift where the wavelength of light is elongated.

MOSFIRE discovered that thatGN-z11's levels of redshift indicates that it existed 400 million years after the Bang Bang.