News Digest

This galaxy far, far away is the farthest one ever found

Astronomers have discovered a baby blue galaxy that is farther away in distance and time than any galaxy ever seen. It’s among the universe’s first generation of galaxies, from 13.1 billion years ago. Scientists used three different telescopes to spot and then calculate the age of the blurry infant galaxy. By measuring how the light has shifted, they determined the galaxy, called EGS-zs8-1, is from about 670 million years after the Big Bang.

the new observations provide an indication of how the stars were forming at these extreme distances, and they seem to be forming differently than the local universe. Every discovery opens up a whole new set of questions.

Pascal Oesch, a postdoctoral researcher at Yale and lead author of the new study

The new observations also show that EGS-zs8-1 is forming stars 80 times faster than the Milky Way. In addition, the still-growing galaxy has “already built more than 15 percent of the mass of our own Milky Way today,”  Pascal Oesch said in a statement from Yale University.