Hubble Shatters the Cosmic Distance Record

An anonymous reader writes: One of the holy grails of cosmology is to measure, directly, exactly when the first stars and galaxies formed in our Universe. The Hubble Space Telescope has been pushing the distance record farther and farther back, with its measurements typically confirmed by ground-based, spectroscopic follow-ups. This time, however, the new record-holder was so distant that confirmation needed to be done from space: by Hubble itself. The result? A galaxy at a redshift of z=11.1, from when the Universe was just 400 million years old, or a mere 3% of its current age. This is a record that will likely stand until the James Webb Space Telescope launches, as it took a combination of incredible work and incredible luck to find a galaxy this far back with our current technology.

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TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to an incredible combination of luck, technology and human ingenuity, the Hubble Space Telescope has identified, measured and confirmed a galaxy farther away in space — and closer to the Big Bang — than ever before. Because the Universe is expanding, and the fabric of space in between galaxies expands as time goes on, the more distant a galaxy actually is, the more its emitted light gets stretched (or redshifted) before it reaches our eyes. Previously, the Universe’s most distant galaxy was known as EGS8p7, whose light was redshifted by an extra factor of 8.63 before it reached our eyes, telling us that it must have come from 13.24 billion years ago: when the Universe was just 573 million years old, or only 4% of its current age. But that record has been shattered, announced an international team of scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope.

The newest record-holder has had its light redshifted by a whopping factor of 11.1, meaning the light is even older: it was emitted 13.40 billion years ago, when the Universe was only 407 million years old, or closer in time to the Big Bang than any other galaxy ever seen before. “We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” announced Pascal Oesch, the principal investigator of this project. You have to be extremely not just skilled, but also extremely lucky to see a galaxy this far back in time using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Thanks to an incredible combination of luck, technology and human ingenuity, the Hubble Space Telescope has identified, measured and confirmed a galaxy farther away in space — and closer to the Big Bang — than ever before. Because the Universe is expanding, and the fabric of space in between galaxies expands as time goes on, the more distant a galaxy actually is, the more its emitted light gets stretched (or redshifted) before it reaches our eyes. Previously, the Universe’s most distant galaxy was known as EGS8p7, whose light was redshifted by an extra factor of 8.63 before it reached our eyes, telling us that it must have come from 13.24 billion years ago: when the Universe was just 573 million years old, or only 4% of its current age. But that record has been shattered, announced an international team of scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope.

The newest record-holder has had its light redshifted by a whopping factor of 11.1, meaning the light is even older: it was emitted 13.40 billion years ago, when the Universe was only 407 million years old, or closer in time to the Big Bang than any other galaxy ever seen before. “We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” announced Pascal Oesch, the principal investigator of this project. You have to be extremely not just skilled, but also extremely lucky to see a galaxy this far back in time using the Hubble Space Telescope.

The skill part is knowing that only the brightest galaxies at these great distances will be visible, since the apparent brightness falls off as the distance-to-the-source squared. The brightest light generated comes from the hottest, most massive stars, which not only predominantly emit ultraviolet light, but which ionize hydrogen atoms, causing the brightest and most powerful transition of all in a hydrogen atom: the Lyman- line, which comes at a wavelength of just 121.567 nanometers, well out of the visible-light range of ~400 to 700 nanometers. As you look farther and farther away, the redshift takes effect, meaning that this line gets shifted all the way through the visible light and into the infrared: to a new wavelength of 121.567 × (1 + 11.1), where 11.1 is the redshift, or 1471 nanometers. Hubble is equipped with a spectrograph, meaning it can break up the light into the individual

A better story

[fnj]

Here is a site reporting this story which is (1) NOT a disgusting malvertising tool like Forbes, and (2) a little closer to the source.

Re:STOP! Pushing Forbes for Science articles!!!

[Hussman32]

To be fair, the first link is to NASA.