NASA's Space Telescopes Spot One of the Youngest Distant Galaxies in the Universe

A team of international astronomers has discovered what may be one of the youngest and most distant galaxies. It is 30 times smaller than our own Milky Way.

NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescope have identified one of the most distant galaxies, offering the astronomers a deep insight into the period when the universe was just 650 million years old. Considering the current age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, the newly discovered galaxy dubbed Abell2744_Y1, is producing nearly 10 times more stars than other galaxies.

The team was led by astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and La Laguna University (ULL). It also involves researchers from Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie de Toulouse and Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, Geneva University and Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne and University of Arizona.

The discovery is a result of the Frontier Fields program that is using NASA's multi wavelength suite of Great Observation to see far into the distant universe. Apart from Spitzer and Hubble, they use the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.

"Just a handful of galaxies at these great distances are known," said Jason Surace, of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "The Frontier Fields program is already working to find more of these distant, faint galaxies. This is a preview of what's to come."

The Spitzer telescope identifies the infrared light, and the shorter wavelength infrared light is detected by Hubble space telescope and the X rays are detected using Chandra X-ray. These telescopes closely examine the clusters of galaxies which are faint and difficult to identify singly by one of the telescopes .

The light from Abell2744_Y1 took 13000 million years to reach Earth, making it one of the brightest galaxies discovered at such distances. Based on the estimation of the properties of Abell2744_Y1, the newly discovered galaxy just does not produce stars making it an exceptional star factory in early universe, but also contains a large amount of gas.

On the whole the Frontier Fields Program will image a total of six clusters of galaxy. Using images from Spitzer, the astronomers will determine the distance of the galaxy and also help in finding the number of stars present in the galaxy.

According to the astronomers, this farthest known galaxy has a redshift of 8, a measure of the degree to which light has been moved toward the redder wavelengths. The redshift increases based on the distance, farther the galaxy, greater the redshift.  The farthest galaxy ever confirmed till date has a redshift of over 7. There are candidates that have redshifts as high as 11.

Nicolas Laporte, post-doctoral researcher at the IAC and expert in the search of distant galaxies, welcomes the high quality of the Hubble images, "We expected to find very distant galaxies close to the cluster core, where the light amplification is maximum. However, this galaxy is very close to the edge of the Hubble image where the light is not strongly amplified. We are really lucky that we could find it in the small field of view of Hubble. In a related study led by Hakim Atek (EPFL, Lausanne) more galaxies are analyzed but none is more distant than Abell2744_Y1." 

The finding was documented in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters.