Newly found galaxies could be most distant known
Last Updated: Thursday, September 17, 2009 | 3:02 PM ET
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Three teams of astronomers in the U.S. and U.K. have used the recently revamped Hubble Space Telescope to find more than 20 previously unknown galaxies, including what could be the most distant found to date.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, taken in 2004, is one of the Hubble's famous images. It shows the 'deepest portrait of the visible universe,' and galaxies so far away that light comes from the first galaxies to emerge shortly after the Big Bang. (NASA, ESA, Hubble Deep Field team) The infrared images from Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 show 16 galaxies that are 12.9 billion light-years from Earth and another five that are 13.1 billion light-years away.
If confirmed, the galaxies would be the most distant objects ever detected. And because they are so far away and their light takes so long to reach Earth, they offer a view of the universe when it was just a few hundred million years old.
Currently, the most distant known object is a gamma-ray burst, dubbed GRB 090423, that NASA's Swift satellite detected in April. The massive stellar explosion was found to be 13.035 billion light-years away.
The distances of these galaxies are based on their redshift, and still need to be confirmed by measuring the frequency of the light coming from the stars there.
Astronomers determine the distance of stars by looking at the light coming from them, and measuring how much the light's wavelength has stretched towards the red end of the spectrum in response to the expansion of the universe.
Just as the sound of a radio from a car moving away from us sounds stretched out, so too does light shift to a longer wavelength as its source moves farther away. Since the universe is expanding, faraway objects are moving away at a faster rate than those closer to us and so their red shift is correspondingly higher.
The gamma-ray burst's red shift was 8.2, while the galaxies' redshifts were all between 8 and 9.
The galaxies are all in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a tiny patch of sky visible in the southern hemisphere where thousands of galaxies have been found.
The astronomers who found the new galaxies are from Caltech, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Oxford. Their research appeared this week in the online physics and mathematics journal arXiv.
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