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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

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Astronomers measure most distant galaxy yet

The Columbian
Published:

An exceptionally bright galaxy called EGS-zs8-1 is now the most remote object to have its precise distance from Earth measured. According to a paper published Tuesday in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the galaxy is so distant that we see it as it was 13 billion years ago, pushing the boundaries of our view of the early universe.

“While we saw the galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago, it had already built more than 15 percent of the mass of our own Milky Way today,” lead study author Pascal Oesch of Yale University said in a statement. “But it had only 670 million years to do so. The universe was still very young then.”

Based on the new measurements, Oesch and his colleagues report, the galaxy was producing new stars at a rate 80 times faster than our own galaxy does today. This adds to growing evidence that young galaxies in the early days of the universe were vigorous star-forming machines, and that they probably behaved a bit differently from the galaxies we can observe near by.

These measurements come from the MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration) instrument on the Keck I telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. When NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is launched in 2018, the researchers say, they expect it to allow them to observe EGS-zs8-1 — and even more distant galaxies — in better detail.

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