Astronomers spot oldest galaxy
26 Oct 2010
Astronomers have spotted the oldest galaxy ever seen, one that was born around 600 million years following the Big Bang.
According to their report in the journal Nature, the galaxy which was seen as a distant smudge with orbiting Hubble Space Telescope is the farthest and the oldest object ever imaged.
The galaxy goes by the unglamorous name of UDFy-38135539, the team of European researchers said.
"Here we report the detection of ... photons emitted less than 600 million years after the Big Bang," they wrote.
The speed of light is 186,000 miles a second, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km) a year, which astronomers use as a kind of time machine. Light from objects very far away shows them as they were in the past.
In the current case light from the galaxy first started traveling 13 billion years ago, right after the Big Bang.
