A team of researchers has identified the most distant galaxy currently measured in the night sky. Galaxy EGS-zs8-1 is so far from our planet that we’re only now seeing light it emitted a staggering 13 billion years ago.
The galaxy is thought to have formed when the Universe was extremely young — clearly the case given the Universe is only a bit older than the galaxy’s light, at 13.8 billion years old. The galaxy’s age was determined using the MOSFIRE instrument on the W.M. Keck Observatory’s 10m telescope, in Hawaii. In a press release, Pascal Oesch, one of the researchers, explained that”it has already built more than 15 per cent of the mass of our own Milky Way today. But it had only 670 million years to do so. The universe was still very young then.” [Yale]