Far-flung galaxy breaks record

[I, Brian]

A small, faint galaxy may claim the title of the most distant object known - breaking a record that was set just two weeks ago.

The new find appears to lie 13.2 billion light-years away from Earth and reveals what the earliest galaxies looked like.

Light from this galaxy may have formed a mere 460 million years after the Big Bang, which formed the Universe 13.7 billion years ago, say its discoverers.

The previous record-holder, reported in February 2004, dates back to 750 million years after the birth of the Universe.

"We are approaching the youngest ages of galaxies," says Roser Pelló, an astronomer at the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées in France and co-leader of the discovery team.

Astronomers have been steadily probing further back in time and space to see when and how the first stars and galaxies formed from dense gas clouds. This murky period was known as the Dark Ages and lasted about one billion years. The radiation from these first stellar objects may have broken apart the clouds' atomic hydrogen into ions - a process known as re-ionisation - to make space transparent.

So far only 30 or so objects have been found that date to the universe's first billion years. But Pelló believes observations such as hers show early galaxies "could be one of the main sources of re-ionisation if they are numerous".



More: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994729