Most Distant Galaxy Ever Confirmed | WIRED Most Distant Galaxy Ever Confirmed subscribe 6 months for $5 - plus a FREE Portable Phone Charger. Author: Lisa Grossman. Lisa Grossman Science Date of Publication: 10.20.10. Time of Publication: 1:17 pm. 1:17 pm Most Distant Galaxy Ever Confirmed Astronomers’ new observations have spotted the most distant galaxy ever seen. The galaxy’s light comes from about 13.1 billion light-years away, making it one of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang. The new galaxy is about 30 million light-years farther away than previous record-holder, a gamma-ray burst that faded within a few hours of its peak brightness, and 200 million light-years farther than the next most distant galaxy. “We are approaching the limits of the observable universe with this observation,” said astronomer Michele Trenti of the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the new work. “It is quite a good improvement.” The finding, published in the Oct. 21 Nature, could also give insight into how young stars helped make the universe transparent.

The new distance champion, deemed UDFy-38135539, was first spotted in late 2009 in a Hubble Space Telescope image called the Ultra Deep Field . The image captures 10,000 galaxies in the universe’s earliest epochs, several of which were good candidates for the most distant galaxy. Because light takes time to travel across the universe, telescopes see these galaxies as they appeared billions of years ago. And because the universe is expanding, distant galaxies appear to be rapidly moving away from us. As the galaxies flee, the wavelength of the light they emit stretches out, or redshifts, similar to how an ambulance siren’s howl drops in pitch as it drives away. Matt Lehnert of the Paris Observatory and colleagues picked the reddest galaxy in the Ultra Deep Field, then took 16 hours of follow-up observations with the SINFONI spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. The team searched for the specific wavelength of light emitted when hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, relaxes from an excited energy state.

Based on the amount of stretching this light experienced on its journey from the distant galaxy to the telescope, astronomers calculated that the galaxy is 13.1 billion light-years away, making it 30 million light-years farther than the next-most distant object ever found. The galaxy probably formed within 600 million years of the Big Bang. Detecting this light at all was a surprising feat, Trenti said. “Most astronomers in the community think spectroscopic confirmation would have been very, very difficult. They were reluctant to try to invest a significant amount of telescope time to get the spectrum,” he said. “Lehnert and colleagues went ahead and really showed that this can be done now, we don’t have to wait for the next generation of more powerful telescopes.” A 30 million-light-year gain may not sound like much on the scale of the entire universe, Trenti added, but it’s like breaking the world record in the 100 meter dash. “You run a few hundredths of a second faster, but that is a big deal,” he said. But the new galaxy is more than just “a trophy on the wall,” Lehnert said.

UDFy-38135539 is the first galaxy observed that formed during the “epoch of reionization,” when radiation from infant stars split hydrogen atoms that fogged up the early universe into protons and electrons. Hydrogen absorbs light at most wavelengths, so without early stars, even nearby galaxies would be completely invisible to us. Reionization began around 600 million years after the Big Bang and wrapped up a few hundred million years later, “which, for the universe, is relatively a blink of an eye,” Lehnert said. “But we don’t know how it happened.” The new most-distant galaxy “basically helps to give us insight into the first galaxies, the galaxies that really were responsible for reionization.” Astronomers know one thing already: The new galaxy is not alone. The galaxy’s young stars blew a transparent bubble of ions around it, which must be big enough to allow astronomers to see the galaxy from Earth. But observations suggest that the galaxy corrals only about 1 billion stars, making it at least 100 times smaller than the Milky Way — too small to blow such a big ionic bubble by itself.

“It must have had friends around it to help it,” Lehnert said. “We have no idea what these friends are like … but this tells us they must be there, and we’re feeling their presence.” The most likely candidates for these helpers are fainter galaxies, but they could be exotic objects like miniature black holes or decaying particles, Lehnert says. Correction: A previous version of this article said the next most-distant object, a gamma-ray burst, was two light-years closer than this galaxy. The true figure is 30 million light-years. Image: NASA/ESA/G. Illingworth/HUDF09 Team The Cosmic Distance Scale The Cosmic Distance Scale The Farthest Visible Reaches of Space About the Image Current observations suggest that the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old. We know that light takes time to travel, so that if we observe an object that is 13 billion light years away, then that light has been traveling towards us for 13 billion years. Essentially, we are seeing that object as it appeared 13 billion years ago. With every year that passes, our newest technology enables us to see further and further back.

The image used for this stop on our journey is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF). The UDF is one of the deepest views of the visible universe to date; certainly it was the deepest when it was originally created in in 2003-2004. There are approximately 10,000 galaxies in this view, which is a sort of "core sample" of a very narrow patch of sky near the constellation Fornax. The smallest, reddest galaxies in the image , of which there are about 100, are among the most distant known objects! UDF, Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team The UDF looks back approximately 13 billion years (approximately between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang ). Galaxies that existed in that time period would be very young and very different in structure and appearance than the grand spirals we see nearby today. Image Credits: UDF - NASA/ESA/S. Beckwith(STScI) and The HUDF Team. For UDF Location and Age of the Universe graphics: NASA What is the Farthest Known Object From Earth?

Update 02/03/16: Here are the newest candidates (as of September and May 2015 respectively) for farthest galaxy yet detected. EGS8p7 at more than 13.2 billion light years away, and EGS-zs8-1 at 13.1 billion light years away. In December of 2012, astronomers announced a Hubble Space Telescope discovery of seven primitive galaxies located over 13 billion light years away from us. The results are from survey of the same patch of sky known as the Ultra Deep Field (UDF). This survey, called UDF12, used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 to peer deeper into space in near- infrared light than any previous Hubble observation. Why infrared? Because the Universe is expanding; therefore the farther back we look, the faster objects are moving away from us, which shifts their light towards the red. Redshift means that light that is emitted as ultraviolet or visible light is shifted more and more to redder wavelengths .

The extreme distance of these newly discovered galaxies means their light has been traveling to us for more than 13 billion years, from a time when the Universe was less than 4% of its current age. Their discovery, which you can read more about in the NASA feature is exciting because it might give us an idea of how abundant galaxies were close to the era when astronomers think galaxies first started forming. ( Phil Plait has a good column about this discovery too.) Credit: NASA, ESA, R. Ellis (Caltech), and the UDF 2012 Team As of this writing it seems that one of the galaxies in this recent Hubble discovery may be a distance record breaker - it was observed 380 million years after the Big Bang, with a redshift of 11.9. This means the light from this galaxy (pictured below) left 13.3+ billion light years ago. Credit: NASA, ESA, R. Ellis (Caltech), and the UDF 2012 Team Just under a month ago, the current candidate was this object: a young galaxy called MACS0647-JD .

It's only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way - and was observed at 420 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was 3 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years. To spot this galaxy, astronomers used the powerful gravity from the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0647+7015 to magnify the light from the distant galaxy; this effect is called gravitational lensing. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman and D. Coe (STScI), and the CLASH Team Earlier in 2012, with the combined power of NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes, as well as the use of gravitational lensing, a team of astronomers spotted what might then have been the most distant galaxy ever seen. Light from this young galaxy, MACS1149-JD, was emitted when our 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old. Credit: NASA, ESA, W. Zheng (JHU), M.

Postman (STScI), and the CLASH Team In 2010, a candidate for most distant galaxy was found in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. UDFy-38135539 is thought to be 13.1 billion light years away. There is more information in this article on Phil Plait's blog. I've used his labeled images: The objects in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field may well be the farthest known objects, but there are other contenders. They include a galaxy called Abell 1835 IR1916, which was discovered in 2004, by astronomers from the European Southern Observatory using a near-infrared instrument on the Very Large Telescope. The object is visible to us because of gravitational lensing by the galaxy cluster Abell 1835, which is between this object and us. This galaxy is thought to be about 13.2 billion light years away, which means it would date to about 500 million years after the Big Bang. Note though, that this find has not been verified by other instruments - the Spitzer Space Telescope tried in 2006 without success.

Abell 1835 by the Hubble, Credit: NASA Also in 2004, a team using both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory discovered a galaxy that is believed to be about 13 billion years away from us. It was found when observing the galaxy cluster Abell 2218. The light from the distant galaxy was visible because of gravitational lensing. The very distant object is the one circled. For more information, check out this press release . Credit: European Space Agency, NASA, J.-P. Kneib (Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées) and R. Ellis (Caltech) Then there's the infrared James Webb Space Telescope. If you recall, Hubble has near infrared capability, but not mid-infrared, and for objects with very high redshifts, to see these most distant of objects would require a powerful telescope with mid-infrared capability. JWST will be able to see back to the first luminous objects to be born after the Big Bang. In fact, one of JWST objectives is to look even further back, to just 200 million years after the Big Bang.

One model of galaxy evolution has the first galaxies forming then and we need JWST to test this theoretical prediction! Top panels: Hubble UDF. Bottom: Simulation of what a JWST Deep Field might look like. Credit: STScI (Note: JWST will be able to see these first galaxies without the aid of gravitational lensing; gravitational lensing might allow us to see them better, but would not necessarily let us see further back in time.) Distance Information Some of the most newly detected objects may be over 13 billion light years away, as derived from a standard model of the Universe. However, a powerful new generation of telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope, will be needed to confirm the suspected distances of these objects. When 13 billion light years is translated into kilometers, there are a staggering number of zeros - it comes out to approximately 123,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km. As time progresses, so will our ability to see futher and further away - giving us insight on the very beginnings of the Universe's existence! How do We Calculate Distances of This Magnitude?

At these distances, objects' redshifts are used, with and extension of Hubble's Law to the distant Universe. Here, we have to know the history of how rapidly the universe was expanding at each moment in time. This can be calculated from the amount of normal and dark matter and of dark energy. Try Prof. Wright's Javascript cosmology calculator at: For more information on Hubble's Law, please read the section on finding distances to the Nearest Superclusters . Why Are These Distances Important To Astronomers? Scientists have estimated the age of the Universe to be 13.73 billion years old (with an uncertainty of about 120 million years). When we observe an object that is 13 billion light years away, we are essentially observing it as it was 13 billion years ago, when the Universe was young. Being able to see and thus hopefully understand the early Universe is important to understanding how it was formed. If we see back far enough, perhaps we will catch a glimpse of the first galaxies as they were just forming. Perhaps we will someday be able to see the first starts forming. Could we see even further back than that? Only time (and technology) will tell!

Travel Time At the rate of 17.3 km/sec (the rate Voyager is traveling away from the Sun), it would take around 225,000,000,000,000 years to reach this distance. At the speed of light , it would take 13 billion years! Clearing the cosmic fog: The most distant galaxy ever measured (w/ Video) Clearing the cosmic fog: The most distant galaxy ever measured (w/ Video) October 20, 2010 Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have measured the distance to the most remote galaxy so far, UDFy-38135539, existing when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6). Image: M. Alvarez, R. Kaehler, and T. Abel (PhysOrg.com) -- A European team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has measured the distance to the most remote galaxy so far.

By carefully analysing the very faint glow of the galaxy they have found that they are seeing it when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6). These are the first confirmed observations of a galaxy whose light is clearing the opaque hydrogen fog that filled the cosmos at this early time. It has taken 13.1 billion years, travelling at 300,000 kilometres (186,000 miles) per second, for this smudge of infant light to arrive. The results will appear in the 21 October issue of the journal Nature. "Using the ESO Very Large Telescope we have confirmed that a galaxy spotted earlier using Hubble is the most remote object identified so far in the Universe", says Matt Lehnert (Observatoire de Paris) who is lead author of the paper reporting the results. "The power of the VLT and its SINFONI spectrograph allows us to actually measure the distance to this very faint galaxy and we find that we are seeing it when the Universe was less than 600 million years old." Studying these first galaxies is extremely difficult.

By the time that their initially brilliant light gets to Earth they appear very faint and small. Furthermore, this dim light falls mostly in the infrared part of the spectrum because its wavelength has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe -- an effect known as redshift . To make matters worse, at this early time, less than a billion years after the Big Bang, the Universe was not fully transparent and much of it was filled with a hydrogen fog that absorbed the fierce ultraviolet light from young galaxies. The period when the fog was still being cleared by this ultraviolet light is known as the era of reionisation. Despite these challenges the new Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope discovered several robust candidate objects in 2009 that were thought to be galaxies shining in the era of reionisation. Confirming the distances to such faint and remote objects is an enormous challenge and can only reliably be done using spectroscopy from very large ground-based telescopes, by measuring the redshift of the galaxy's light. The video will load shortly A European team of astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has measured the distance to the most remote galaxy so far.

By carefully analysing the very faint glow of the galaxy they have found that they are seeing it when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6). These are the first confirmed observations of a galaxy whose light is clearing the opaque hydrogen fog that filled the cosmos at this early time. Credit: ESO Matt Lehnert takes up the story: "After the announcement of the candidate galaxies from Hubble we did a quick calculation and were excited to find that the immense light collecting power of the VLT, when combined with the sensitivity of the infrared spectroscopic instrument, SINFONI, and a very long exposure time might just allow us to detect the extremely faint glow from one of these remote galaxies and to measure its distance." On special request to ESO's Director General they obtained telescope time on the VLT and observed a candidate galaxy called UDFy-38135539 for 16 hours. After two months of very careful analysis and testing of their results, the team found that they had clearly detected the very faint glow from hydrogen at a redshift of 8.6, which makes this galaxy the most distant object ever confirmed by spectroscopy.

A redshift of 8.6 corresponds to a galaxy seen just 600 million years after the Big Bang . Co-author Nicole Nesvadba (Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale) sums up this work, "Measuring the redshift of the most distant galaxy so far is very exciting in itself, but the astrophysical implications of this detection are even more important. This is the first time we know for sure that we are looking at one of the galaxies that cleared out the fog which had filled the very early Universe." One of the surprising things about this discovery is that the glow from UDFy-38135539 seems not to be strong enough on its own to clear out the hydrogen fog. "There must be other galaxies , probably fainter and less massive nearby companions of UDFy-38135539, which also helped make the space around the galaxy transparent. Without this additional help the light from the galaxy, no matter how brilliant, would have been trapped in the surrounding hydrogen fog and we would not have been able to detect it", explains co-author Mark Swinbank (Durham University).

Co-author Jean-Gabriel Cuby (Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille) remarks: "Studying the era of reionisation and galaxy formation is pushing the capability of current telescopes and instruments to the limit, but this is just the type of science that will be routine when ESO's European Extremely Large Telescope  which will be the biggest optical and near infrared telescope in the world  becomes operational." UDFy-38135539 Is Most Distant Galaxy Ever Measured | Science 2.0 UDFy-38135539 Is Most Distant Galaxy Ever Measured News Staff Astronomers report they have measured the distance to the most remote galaxy and have found that they are seeing it when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6), making those the first confirmed observations of a galaxy whose light is clearing the opaque hydrogen fog that filled the cosmos at this early time.

“Using the ESO Very Large Telescope we have confirmed that a galaxy spotted earlier using Hubble is the most remote object identified so far in the Universe” , says Matt Lehnert (Observatoire de Paris) who is lead author of the paper reporting the results. “The power of the VLT and its SINFONI spectrograph allows us to actually measure the distance to this very faint galaxy and we find that we are seeing it when the Universe was less than 600 million years old.” Studying these first galaxies is extremely difficult. By the time that their initially brilliant light gets to Earth they appear very faint and small. Furthermore, this dim light falls mostly in the infrared part of the spectrum because its wavelength has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe — an effect known as redshift. To make matters worse, at this early time, less than a billion years after the Big Bang, the Universe was not fully transparent and much of it was filled with a hydrogen fog that absorbed the fierce ultraviolet light from young galaxies. The period when the fog was still being cleared by this ultraviolet light is known as the era of reionization. CLICK IMAGE ABOVE FOR LARGER SIZE.

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have now measured the distance to the most remote galaxy so far, UDFy-38135539 (the faint object shown in the excerpt on the left), which we see as it was when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6). These are the first confirmed observations of a galaxy whose light is clearing the opaque hydrogen fog that filled the cosmos at this early time. Credit:NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and University of California, Santa Cruz) and the HUDF09 Team. Despite these challenges the new Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope discovered several robust candidate objects in 2009 that were thought to be galaxies shining in the era of reionization. Confirming the distances to such faint and remote objects is an enormous challenge and can only reliably be done using spectroscopy from very large ground-based telescopes, by measuring the redshift of the galaxy’s light.

Matt Lehnert says, “After the announcement of the candidate galaxies from Hubble we did a quick calculation and were excited to find that the immense light collecting power of the VLT, when combined with the sensitivity of the infrared spectroscopic instrument, SINFONI, and a very long exposure time might just allow us to detect the extremely faint glow from one of these remote galaxies and to measure its distance.” They obtained telescope time on the VLT and observed the candidate galaxy called UDFy-38135539 for 16 hours. After two months of very careful analysis and testing of their results, the team found that they had clearly detected the very faint glow from hydrogen at a redshift of 8.6, which makes this galaxy the most distant object ever confirmed by spectroscopy. A redshift of 8.6 corresponds to a galaxy seen just 600 million years after the Big Bang. A European team of astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has measured the distance to the most remote galaxy so far, UDFy-38135539.

By carefully analysing the very faint glow of the galaxy they have found that they are seeing it when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6). These are the first confirmed observations of a galaxy whose light is clearing the opaque hydrogen fog that filled the cosmos at this early time. Credit: ESO. Editing: Herbert Zodet. Written by: Richard Hook and Douglas Pierce-Price. Narration: Dr. J. Music: movetwo. Footage and photos: ESO, NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory and University of California, Santa Cruz) and the HUDF09 Team, A. M. Swinbank and S. Zieleniewski, M. Alvarez, R. Kaehler and T. Abel and José Francisco Salgado (josefrancisco.org). Directed by: Herbert Zodet. Executive producer: Lars Lindberg Christensen. One of the surprising things about this discovery is that the glow from UDFy-38135539 seems not to be strong enough on its own to clear out the hydrogen fog.

“There must be other galaxies, probably fainter and less massive nearby companions of UDFy-38135539, which also helped make the space around the galaxy transparent. Without this additional help the light from the galaxy, no matter how brilliant, would have been trapped in the surrounding hydrogen fog and we would not have been able to detect it”, explains co-author Mark Swinbank (Durham University). Co-author Jean-Gabriel Cuby (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille) remarks: “Studying the era of reionisation and galaxy formation is pushing the capability of current telescopes and instruments to the limit, but this is just the type of science that will be routine when ESO’s European Extremely Large Telescope — which will be the biggest optical and near infrared telescope in the world — becomes operational.” Citation: M. D. Lehnert, N. P. H. Nesvadba, J.-G. Cuby, A. M. Swinbank, S. Morris, B. Cle´ment, C. J. Evans, M. N. Bremer&S.

Basa, 'Spectroscopic confirmation of a galaxy at redshift z58.6', Nature Oct 21 2010 pp 940-942 doi:10.1038/nature09462 Universe's Most Distant Object Spotted Universe's Most Distant Object Spotted Galaxy emitted light just 600 million years after the big bang. View Images The approximate location of the most distant known galaxy is shown in yellow in an older Hubble picture. Hubble image courtesy ESA/NASA A galaxy 13.12 billion light-years from Earth is the most distant object yet detected, a new study says. Related Content Here’s What Our Galaxy Would Look Like With Superhuman Vision Astronomers spotted a faint glimmer of infrared light from this primitive galaxy, called UDFy-38135539, using the European Southern Observatory 's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Because of the time it takes for the distant galaxy's light to reach Earth, the recently captured signal is thought to have been emitted when the universe was only 600 million years old.

That means the find can help scientists better understand the so-called era of reionization, the study authors say. For about the first billion years after the big bang , the universe was filled with an opaque fog of neutral hydrogen. As the very first stars and galaxies formed out of this fog, their radiation charged any nearby hydrogen. This ionization transformed the fog into the optically transparent interstellar medium that exists today. (Related: "Big Bang Ripples Formed Universe's First Stars." ) "The universe at the time was quite an interesting place, as progressively more and more galaxies were formed, while the existing galaxies were merging together and growing in size and luminosity," said Michele Trenti , a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado in Boulder who was not involved in the study. "The photons emitted from these galaxies were stripping off electrons from the hydrogen atoms in the interstellar gas, creating bubbles of ionized gas surrounding these [galaxies].

"This bubble"—the one surrounding the newfound galaxy—"is proof that after about 600 million years from the big bang, stars in galaxies have almost completed the process of hydrogen reionization." Going the Galactic Distance Until now, the most distant confirmed galaxy was one spotted 12.93 billion light-years from Earth, said Trenti, who wrote a commentary on the study. (Related: "Earliest Known Galaxies Spied in Deep Hubble Picture." ) Palaeos : Cosmos : The Stelliferous Era : Structure formation - Galaxies and Stars The Stelliferous Era Glossary References The first stars appeared about 400 million years after the Big Bang. Cosmic Timeline graphic copied from The First Stars and Galaxies , original source unspecified (NASA?) Editor's note: I'm just copying this from Wikipedia , with some additional material from various sources. Essentially, this is just a basic place holder page and collection of notes and diagrams. In the future more could be added here, if someone wants to contribute MAK110725 Structure formation in the big bang model proceeds hierarchically, with smaller structures forming before larger ones.

The first structures to form are quasars, which are thought to be bright, early active galaxies, and population III stars. Before this epoch , the evolution of the universe could be understood through linear cosmological perturbation theory: that is, all structures could be understood as small deviations from a perfect homogeneous universe. This is computationally relatively easy to study. At this point non-linear structures begin to form, and the computational problem becomes much more difficult, involving, for example, N-body simulations with billions of particles. - Wikipedia Hydrogen Reionization: 150 million to 1 billion years: The first stars and quasars form from gravitational collapse. The intense radiation they emit reionizes the surrounding universe. Energy from these early massive stars ionized cold interstellar hydrogen from the big bang. This epoch is called reionization because the hydrogen nuclei were originally in an ionized state shortly after the big bang. From this point on, most of the universe is composed of plasma. - Hubblesite , Wikipedia Timeline of cosmic history (reproduced from a 2001 press release by Dr. George Djorgovski), showing reionization, after which the universe becomes transparent. From Searching for Cosmic Dawn by Dr.

Richard Ellis. It is now known that there was a second, helium reionization stage about two billion years later First Light, after a few hundred million years of darkness (the opaque universe or "dark ages"). This first light is believed to have been captured in data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope , which detects infrared. The light detected by Spitzer would have originated as visible and ultraviolet light, then stretched, or redshifted, to lower-energy infrared wavelengths during its long voyage to reach us across expanding space. The cosmic microwave background radiation detected by the Cosmic Background Explorer and the Wilkinson Anisotropy Microwave Probe traveled farther to reach us, and so stretched to even lower-energy microwave wavelengths. From Brief History of the Universe Astronomers do not know if the very first objects were either stars or quasars. Formation of stars: The first stars, most likely Population III stars (our sun is a Population I star), form and through nuclear fusion begin turning the light elements that were formed during the nucleosynthesis stage (hydrogen, helium and lithium) into heavier elements. These stars were thought to have been much larger and brighter than any in our nearby universe, with masses about 1,000 times that of our sun.

As of yet there have been no observed Population III stars, and understanding of them is currently based on computational models of their formation and evolution. These stars grouped together in mini-galaxies. The first quasars ultimately became the centers of powerful galaxies that are more common in the distant universe. ( From Brief History of the Universe , Wikipedia ) I've noticed this image a few times on line but don't have further information. The implication is that most stars formed earlier than previously though. This puts star formation simultaneous with Hydrogen Reionization. It was a busy time in the cosmos back then. The diagram shows a standard time scale (with gigayears along the bottom), not the logarithmic ones that are used to describe the very early universe MAK110725 Formation of galaxies: Population II stars are formed early on in this process, with Population I stars (the majority of current stars, including the Sun) formed later.

13.1 bya (600 million years after the Big Bang) UDFy-38135539 (also known as "HUDF.YD3") is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) identifier for a galaxy which has been calculated (as of October 2010) to have a light travel time of 13.1 billion years with a present co-moving distance (due to expansion of the universe) of around 30 billion light-years. It is the first observed galaxy to have existed during the reionization epoch, gives us a window into the early universe. There was a report in January 2011 of yet another more than 13 billion years old that existed a mere 480 million years after the Big Bang. - Wikipedia Hubble Deep and Ultra Deep Field, in relation to the Big Bang. By looking into furthest space we are actually looking back in time. Image from Space-Time and Expansion of the Universe Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Each of the blotches of light is a galaxy, each galaxy containing tens to hundreds of millions of stars - MAK The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003, through to January 16, 2004. It is the deepest image of the universe ever taken, and hence shows the earliest galaxies, looking back approximately 13 billion years, between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only 5% its current age, and will be used to search for galaxies that existed at that time. It shows a number of small galaxies merging to form larger ones, - Wikipedia 12 1/2 bya (1000 million years after the Big Bang) The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area 2.5 arcminutes across, two parts in a million of the whole sky.

The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995. The field is so small that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known. By revealing such large numbers of very young galaxies, the HDF has become a landmark image in the study of the early universe, with the associated scientific paper having received over 800 citations by the end of 2008. - Epic of Evolution Timeline - Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd Helium Reionization - 11.7 to 11.3 billion years ago, when the universe stripped electrons off from primeval helium atoms — a process called ionization. This process heated intergalactic gas and inhibited it from gravitationally collapsing to form new generations of stars in some small galaxies. The lowest-mass galaxies were not even able to hold onto their gas, and it escaped back into intergalactic space.

Hubblesite 10 bya first population I stars, which contain heavier elements and hence are more likely to be accompanied by planets ca 8 bya Based on nucleocosmochronology, the disk of the Milky Way is estimated to have been formed 8.3 ± 1.8 billion years ago. - VLT, Hubble Smash Record for Eyeing Most Distant Galaxy - Universe Today Universe Today VLT, Hubble Smash Record for Eyeing Most Distant Galaxy Article Updated: 24 Dec , 2015 by Nancy Atkinson [/caption] Using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have looked back to find the most distant galaxy so far. “We are observing a galaxy that existed essentially when the Universe was only about 600 million years old, and we are looking at this galaxy – and the Universe – 13.1 billion years ago,” said Dr. Matt Lehnert from the Observatoire de Paris, who is the lead author of a new paper in Nature. “Conditions were quite different back then.

The basic picture in which this discovery is embedded is that this is the epoch in which the Universe went from largely neutral to basically ionized.” Lehnert and an international team used the VLT to make follow-up observations of the galaxy — called UDFy-38135539 – which Hubble observations in 2009 had revealed. The astronomers analyzed the very faint glow of the galaxy to measure its distance — and age. This is the first confirmed observations of a galaxy whose light is emerging from the reionization of the Universe. The reionization period is about the farthest back in time that astronomers can observe. The Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, created a hot, murky universe. Some 400,000 years later, temperatures cooled, electrons and protons joined to form neutral hydrogen, and the murk cleared. Some time before 1 billion years after the Big Bang, neutral hydrogen began to form stars in the first galaxies, which radiated energy and changed the hydrogen back to being ionized.

Although not the thick plasma soup of the earlier period just after the Big Bang, this galaxy formation started the reionization epoch, clearing the opaque hydrogen fog that filled the cosmos at this early time. A simulation of galaxies during the era of deionization in the early Universe. Credit: M. Alvarez, R. Kaehler, and T. Abel “The whole history of the Universe is from the reionization,” Lehnert said during an online press briefing. “The dark matter that pervades the Universe began to drag the gas along and formed the first galaxies. When the galaxies began to form, it reionized the Universe.” UDFy-38135539 is about 100 million light-years farther than the previous most distant object, a gamma-ray burst. Studying these first galaxies is extremely difficult, Lehnert said, as the dim light falls mostly in the infrared part of the spectrum because its wavelength has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe — an effect known as redshift. During the time of less than a billion years after the Big Bang, the hydrogen fog that pervaded the Universe absorbed the fierce ultraviolet light from young galaxies.

The new Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope discovered several candidate objects in 2009, and with 16 hours of observations using the VLT, the team was able to was used to detect the very faint glow from hydrogen at a redshift of 8.6. The team used the SINFONI infrared spectroscopic instrument on the VLT and a very long exposure time. “Measuring the redshift of the most distant galaxy so far is very exciting in itself,” said co-author Nicole Nesvadba (Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale), “but the astrophysical implications of this detection are even more important. This is the first time we know for sure that we are looking at one of the galaxies that cleared out the fog which had filled the very early Universe.” One of the surprising things about this discovery is that the glow from UDFy-38135539 seems not to be strong enough on its own to clear out the hydrogen fog.

“There must be other galaxies, probably fainter and less massive nearby companions of UDFy-38135539,” said co-author Mark Swinbank from Durham University, “which also helped make the space around the galaxy transparent. Without this additional help the light from the galaxy, no matter how brilliant, would have been trapped in the surrounding hydrogen fog and we would not have been able to detect it.” Galaxies - News Articles Galaxies Milky Way shaken... and stirred PhysOrg - January 20, 2014 team of scientists headed by Ivan Minchev from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), has found a way to reconstruct the evolutionary history of our galaxy, the Milky Way, to a new level of detail. The investigation of a data set of stars near the Sun was decisive for the now published results. The astronomers studied how the vertical motions of stars - in the direction perpendicular to the galactic disc - depend on their ages. Because a direct determination of the age of stars is difficult, the astronomers instead analyzed the chemical composition of stars: an increase in the ratio of magnesium to iron ([Mg/Fe]) points to a greater age.

Scientific American - November 22, 2013 Two dwarf galaxies may have smashed together in our Local Group, sparking the nearest "starburst". Giant galaxies such as the Milky Way and its neighbor Andromeda originated long ago after smaller galaxies crashed together and grew larger. Observing this process in action, however, is difficult because it requires detecting collisions between dwarf galaxies near the edge of the observable universe, where we see galaxies as they appeared more than 10 billion years ago. Now astronomers have uncovered evidence of a similar collision much closer to home - a mere 2.6 million light-years from Earth - in a small galaxy named IC 10, allowing them to watch a dwarf�dwarf smashup in detail. Ancient Galaxy Is Farthest Ever Seen Live Science - October 23, 2013 By using data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope and observations from the Keck I telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, astronomers have now confirmed that the galaxy designated z8_GND_5296 formed within 700 million years after the beginning of the universe, making it the oldest and most distant galaxy ever verified.

The peanut at the heart of our galaxy PhysOrg - September 12, 2013 This artist's impression shows how the Milky Way galaxy would look seen from almost edge on and from a very different perspective than we get from the Earth. The central bulge shows up as a peanut shaped glowing ball of stars and the spiral arms and their associated dust clouds form a narrow band. Two groups of astronomers have used data from ESO telescopes to make the best three-dimensional map yet of the central parts of the Milky Way. They have found that the inner regions take on a peanut-like, or X-shaped, appearance from some angles. This odd shape was mapped by using public data from ESO's VISTA survey telescope along with measurements of the motions of hundreds of very faint stars in the central bulge. Hidden galactic nuclei PhysOrg - August 10, 2012 At the core of most galaxies including our own Milky Way is a massive black hole. Material falling into the environment of the black hole heats up, and can radiate dramatically, sometimes also powering the ejection of bipolar jets of rapidly moving charged particles.

These so-called active galactic nuclei (AGN) are observed to have roughly two types of characteristics: bright, rapidly moving hot gas with dust emission features, or dust absorption with modest (or no) fast gas. Huge "Structure" of Satellites Found Orbiting Milky Way National Geographic - May 1, 2012 A huge "structure" of satellite galaxies and star clusters has been found wheeling around the Milky Way, according to a new study. The discovery surprised scientists, in part because the structure might spell trouble for theories of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible substance that's thought to make up about 23 percent of the mass in the universe. The finding is only the latest to question dark matter's existence�last week, for instance, astronomers announced that they'd failed to detect dark matter in the sun's neighborhood, even though the substance should be there, according to accepted theory. Rare "Emerald Cut" Galaxy Found National Geographic - March 21, 2012 Not only are there diamonds in the sky, some of them are emerald-cut sparklers, according to astronomers who've found an unusual rectangular galaxy.

The cosmic oddball, dubbed LEDA 074886, is a dwarf galaxy 70 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus, the River. Most galaxies exist in one of three forms: a disk with spiral arms (such as our Milky Way), a football-shaped ellipsoid, or an irregular, lumpy blob. But LEDA 074886 is a remarkably symmetrical rectangle, akin to an emerald-cut gem. Astronomers weigh in on Milky Way's true colors BBC - January 12, 2012 Astronomers have determined exactly what color our home galaxy the Milky Way is - and find it is aptly named. They wanted to find out how our galaxy looked from the outside - a difficult task given the Earth is inside it. A comparison of star types in other galaxies gives perhaps an unsurprising result: white. But not just any white: specifically, like spring snow at an hour after sunrise or before sunset. Astronomers determine color of the Milky Way Galaxy PhysOrg - January 11, 2012 A team of astronomers in Pitt's Kenneth P.

Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences announced today the most accurate determination yet of the color of the (aptly named) Milky Way Galaxy: "a very pure white, almost mirroring a fresh spring snowfall." Coming Face-to-Face With Our Galaxy's Black Hole Discovery - December 19, 2011 At the center of our galaxy resides an invisible monster, a dark giant composed of the shredded and swallowed remains of stars, nebulae and solar systems. It has captured enormous nearby stars into orbit, causing them to whip around the galactic center at breakneck speeds until they too become just another snack. It may sound like science fiction but all observations indicate it's indeed a fact: a supermassive black hole - called Sagittarius A* - exists. It's real, it's huge, and it's hungry. Sagittarius A* is a monstrous black hole estimated to contain the mass equivalent to 4 million suns, packed into a space less than the distance between Earth and the sun, resulting in an incredibly dense object known as a black hole -- in the case of Sgr A*, a supermassive black hole.

Although Sgr A* is itself invisible the effect of its gravity on surrounding stars has been seen, some of which orbit it at speeds of over 600 miles per second! In a Star's Final Days, Astronomers Hunt 'Signal of Impending Doom' Science Daily - December 1, 2011 An otherwise nondescript binary star system in the Whirlpool Galaxy has brought astronomers tantalizingly close to their goal of observing a star just before it goes supernova. In the first survey of its kind, the researchers have been scanning 25 nearby galaxies for stars that brighten and dim in unusual ways, in order to catch a few that are about to meet their end. In the three years since the study began, this particular unnamed binary system in the Whirlpool Galaxy was the first among the stars they've cataloged to produce a supernova. Unexpectedly Heavy Stars from Long Ago Puzzle Astronomers Live Science - December 1, 2011 Ancient stars found in the outer reaches of our Milky Way are surprisingly chock full of some of the heaviest chemical elements, which could have formed in the galaxy's early history, a new study reveals.

When astronomers found abnormally large amounts of heavy elements like gold, platinum and uranium in some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way they were puzzled, because an abundance of very heavy metals is typically only seen in much later generations of stars. To investigate this mystery, researchers observed these ancient stars over the course of several years using the European Southern Observatory's fleet of telescopes in Chile. They trained their telescopes on 17 "abnormal" stars in the Milky Way that were found to be rich in the heaviest chemical elements. Voyager Probes Detect "Invisible" Milky Way Glow National Geographic - December 1, 2011 Speeding toward interstellar space, NASA's twin Voyager probes have now truly peered outside the solar system - and they've seen something no human has glimpsed before. According to a new study, the two spacecraft have detected a type of ultraviolet light from other regions of our Milky Way galaxy that had previously been all but invisible due to the sun's glow.

A planet made of diamond PhysOrg - August 25, 2011 A once-massive star that's been transformed into a small planet made of diamond: that is what University of Manchester astronomers think they've found in the Milky Way. Saturn has rings - this planet has diamonds MSNBC - August 25, 2011 A newly discovered alien planet that formed from a dead star is a real diamond in the rough. The super-high pressure of the planet, which orbits a rapidly pulsing neutron star, has likely caused the carbon within it to crystallize into an actual diamond, a new study suggests. The composition of the planet, which is about five times the size of Earth, is not its only outstanding feature. "Diamond" Planet Found; May Be Stripped Star Live Science - August 25, 2011 The newfound planet orbits the pulsar so closely the entire system would fit inside the sun. An exotic planet as dense as diamond has been found in the Milky Way, and astronomers think the world is a former star that got transformed by its orbital partner.

The odd planet was discovered orbiting what's known as a millisecond pulsar - a tiny, fast-spinning corpse of a massive star that died in a supernova. Astronomers estimate that the newfound planet is 34,175 miles (55,000 kilometers) across, or about five times Earth's diameter. Striking Photo Looks Into the 'Eyes' of Cosmic Virgin Live Science - August 25, 2011 A spectacular new photo from an observatory in Chile has snapped a spectacular photo of two peculiar galaxies that scientists call "The Eyes." The new photo, released today (Aug. 24), shows a view of the Eyes from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. The Eyes are about 50 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin) and are some 100,000 light-years apart. The cores of the two galaxies are bright white ovals that resemble a pair of eyes glowing in the dark when seen in a moderate-sized telescope, ESO officials said.

Galaxy sized twist in time pulls violating particles back into line PhysOrg - July 14, 2011 University of Warwick physicist has produced a galaxy sized solution which explains one of the outstanding puzzles of particle physics, while leaving the door open to the related conundrum of why different amounts of matter and antimatter seem to have survived the birth of our Universe. Hubble telescope detects the oldest known galaxy BBC - January 26, 2011 The Hubble Space Telescope has detected what scientists believe may be the oldest galaxy ever observed. It is thought the galaxy is more than 13 billion years old and existed 480 million years after the Big Bang. A Nasa team says this was a period when galaxy formation in the early Universe was going into "overdrive". Dark-Matter Galaxy Detected: Hidden Dwarf Lurks Nearby? National Geographic - January 15, 2011 Signs point to an invisible "Galaxy X" just outside our own. An entire galaxy may be lurking, unseen, just outside our own.

The invisibility of "Galaxy X"- as the purported body has been dubbed - may be due less to its apparent status as a dwarf galaxy than to its murky location and its overwhelming amount of dark matter, astronomer Sukanya Chakrabarti speculates. Detectable only by the effects of its gravitational pull, dark matter is an invisible material that scientists think makes up more than 80 percent of the mass in the universe. The impact of double black holes and radio galaxies in the Milky Way PhysOrg - January 4, 2011 Radio galaxies beam as much as one trillion solar-luminosities of radiation into space at radio wavelengths. They are therefore cosmic beacons, and the light from the most distant ones known was emitted back when the universe was only a few billions of years old (compared with its age today of about 13.7 billion years). The origin of this intense emission is thought to lie in the hot environment of a massive black hole at the galaxy's nucleus, with the radio emission being produced by electrons moving rapidly in strong magnetic fields.

Astronomers seeking to better understand galaxies in general, and the context of the Milky Way's origins, want to know when and how radio galaxies formed, how they evolved, and how they impact their environments. Bubbles of Energy Are Found in Galaxy New York Times - November 10, 2010 Something big is going on at the center of the galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they don�t know what it is. Huge Gamma Ray Bubbles Found Around Milky Way NASA - November 10, 2010 Did you know that our Milky Way Galaxy has huge bubbles emitting gamma rays from the direction of the galactic center? Neither did anybody. As the data from the Earth-orbiting Fermi satellite began acuminating (tapering gradually to a sharp point) over the past two years, however, a large and unusual feature toward our Galaxy's center became increasingly evident. The two bubbles are visible together as the red and white spotted oval surrounding the center of the above all sky image, released yesterday. The plane of our Galaxy runs horizontally across the image center.

Assuming the bubbles emanate from our Galaxy's center, the scale of the bubbles is huge, rivaling the entire Galaxy in size, and spanning about 50,000 light years from top to bottom. Earlier indications of the bubbles has been found on existing all sky maps in the radio, microwave, and X-ray. The cause of the bubbles is presently unknown, but will likely be researched for years to come. Space telescopes reveal previously unknown brilliant X-ray explosion in our Milky Way galaxy PhysOrg - October 22, 2010 Astronomers in Japan, using an X-ray detector on the International Space Station, and at Penn State University, using NASA's Swift space observatory, are announcing the discovery of an object newly emitting X-rays, which previously had been hidden inside our Milky Way galaxy in the constellation Centaurus. Universe's Most Distant Object Spotted National Geographic - October 20, 2010 Galaxy emitted light just 600 million years after the big bang. A galaxy 13.12 billion light-years from Earth is the most distant object yet detected, a new study says.

Astronomers spotted a faint glimmer of infrared light from this primitive galaxy, called UDFy-38135539, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Galaxy is most distant object yet BBC - October 20, 2010 A tiny faint dot in a Hubble picture has been confirmed as the most distant galaxy ever detected in the Universe. This collection of stars is so far away its light has taken more than 13 billion years to arrive at Earth. Scientists get a look at the birth of the Milky Way PhysOrg - June 22, 2010 For the first time, a team of astronomers has succeeded in investigating the earliest phases of the evolutionary history of our home Galaxy, the Milky Way. The scientists, from the Argelander Institute for Astronomy at Bonn University and the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, deduce that the early Galaxy went from smooth to clumpy in just a few hundred million years.

VISTA Views the Sculptor Galaxy Science Daily - June 21, 2010 A spectacular new image of the Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253) has been taken with the European Southern Observatory's VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile as part of one of its first major observational campaigns. By observing in infrared light VISTA's view is less affected by dust and reveals a myriad of cooler stars as well as a prominent bar of stars across the central region. The VISTA image provides much new information on the history and development of the galaxy. 'Monster' Black Holes Activate When Galaxies Collide Space.com - June 21, 2010 Enormous black holes, some of the most powerful sources of radiation in the universe, apparently switch on after galaxies collide, researchers have found. The centers of as many as a tenth of all galaxies generate more energy than can be explained by stars, with some of these "active galactic nuclei" releasing more radiation than the entire Milky Way galaxy combined, but from a space no larger than our solar system.

Astronomers suspect this energy is released when matter falls into giant, supermassive black holes that are up to billions of times the mass of our sun at these galaxies' cores. Astronomers discover clue to origin of Milky Way gas clouds PhysOrg - May 26, 2010 A surprising discovery that hydrogen gas clouds found in abundance in and above our Milky Way Galaxy have preferred locations has given astronomers a key clue about the origin of such clouds, which play an important part in galaxy evolution. The astronomers studied gas clouds in two distinct regions of the Galaxy. The clouds they studied are between 400 and 15,000 light-years outside the disk-like plane of the Galaxy. The disk contains most of the Galaxy's stars and gas, and is surrounded by a "halo" of gas more distant than the clouds the astronomers studied. Origins of the Milky Way PhysOrg - March 20, 2010 According to current astronomical models, the Milky Way and other large galaxies formed over billions of years in a process that involved interactions between smaller galaxies, and in particular the gradual capture of many stars from nearby dwarf galaxies (small galaxies with hundreds or thousands of times fewer stars than the Milky Way).

Our current galactic neighborhood hosts one other comparably large galaxy, Andromeda, and several dozen dwarf galaxies of various types, including the so-called Magellanic Clouds and a dwarf galaxy called the Sculptor Dwarf Galaxy. Astronomers piecing together the history of the Milky Way, including its genetic heritage from neighbors, recognize that our story also very likely reflects the cosmic story of how galaxies everywhere are assembled. Old star is 'missing link' in galactic evolution PhysOrg - March 3, 2010 A newly discovered star outside the Milky Way has yielded important clues about the evolution of our galaxy. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 280,000 light-years away, the star has a chemical make-up similar to the Milky Way's oldest stars, supporting theories that our galaxy grew by absorbing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks. Home Computers Around the World Unite to Map the Milky Way Science Daily - February 11, 2010 At this very moment, tens of thousands of home computers around the world are quietly working together to solve the largest and most basic mysteries of our galaxy.

Enthusiastic and inquisitive volunteers from Africa to Australia are donating the computing power of everything from decade-old desktops to sleek new netbooks to help computer scientists and astronomers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute map the shape of our Milky Way galaxy. Now, just this month, the collected computing power of these humble home computers has surpassed one petaflop, a computing speed that surpasses the world's second fastest supercomputer. Hubble Reaches the 'Undiscovered Country' of Primeval Galaxies PhysOrg - January 5, 2010 NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has broken the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before. The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable Universe. This makes Hubble a powerful "time machine" that allows astronomers to see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago, just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang.

Scientists reveal Milky Way's magnetic attraction PhysOrg - January 6, 2010 An international research project involving the University of Adelaide has revealed that the magnetic field in the centre of the Milky Way is at least 10 times stronger than the rest of the Galaxy. The evidence is significant because it gives astronomers a lower limit on the magnetic field, an important factor in calculating a whole range of astronomical data. Researchers from the Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics, the University of Adelaide, Monash University and the United States have published their findings in Nature this week. Some of the Universe's First Galaxies Discovered Space.com - November 6, 2009 A new survey has found 22 of the earliest galaxies to form in the universe, confirming the age of one at just 787 million years after the theoretical Big Bang. These and other galaxies from the universe?s childhood could help shed light on the conditions that governed the early universe.

Stars Fueled by Dark Matter Could Hold Secrets to the Universe PhysOrg - November 3, 2009 The first stars in the universe may have been very different from the stars we see today, yet they may hold clues to understanding some of the mysterious features of the universe. These "dark stars," first theorized in 2007, could grow to be much larger than modern stars, and would be powered by dark matter particles that annihilate inside them, rather than by nuclear fusion. In the early universe, dark stars would have emitted visible light like the Sun, but today their light would be redshifted into the infrared range by the time it reaches us, and so dark stars would be invisible to the naked eye. Shedding Light on the Cosmic Skeleton PhysOrg - November 3, 2009 Astronomers have tracked down a gigantic, previously unknown assembly of galaxies located almost seven billion light-years away from us.

The discovery, made possible by combining two of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world -- ESO's Very Large Telescope and NAOJ�s Subaru Telescope -- is the first observation of such a prominent galaxy structure in the distant Universe, providing further insight into the cosmic web and how it formed. This 3-D illustration shows the position of the galaxies and reveals the extent of this gigantic structure. The galaxies located in the newly discovered structure are shown in red. Galaxies that are either in front or behind the structure are shown in blue. Physicist Makes New High-resolution Panorama Of Milky Way Science Daily - October 29, 2009 Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the November issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. There is a giant black hole at the center of our galaxy, a study has confirmed.

BBC - December 10, 2008 There is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a 16-year study by German astronomers has confirmed. They tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using two telescopes in Chile. The black hole, said to be 27,000 light years from Earth, is four million times bigger than the Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal. Black holes are objects whose gravity is so great that nothing - including light - can escape them. According to Dr Robert Massey, of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the results suggest that galaxies form around giant black holes in the way that a pearl forms around grit. Streams of Stars Reveal Cannibal Nature of Milky Way Space.com - May 31, 2007 Stellar streams are thought to form over billions of years as our galaxy?s gravity slowly tears apart globular clusters and even dwarf galaxies. The stars, which were once packed tightly together, are now separated by light-years, trailing one another as they jet at high speeds through the galactic halo. Why Are Galaxies without Black Holes Uncommon?

PhysOrg - May 31, 2007 Recent calculations indicate that when two galaxies, and the supermassive black holes that lie at their centers, merge, these galactic 'marriages' frequently produce gravitational forces strong enough to kick the new combined black hole right out of its merged galaxy. However, so far, none of the many 'empty nest' galaxies predicted by such calculations have been found. Hubble sees 'most distant object' BBC - February 2004 The farthest object in the Universe yet detected has been seen by scientists using the Hubble and Keck telescopes. It is so distant its light must have set out when the Universe was just 750m years old to reach the Earth now. Aliens in our galaxy? Experts map possible hotbeds National Geographic - January 6, 2004 Scientists say a ring-shaped region in the disc of the Milky Way shows the highest potential for life in our galaxy. But don't expect them to find extraterrestrial life anytime soon: In this region, there are some 20 billion star systems that offer the prerequisites of life.

The team of astronomers has identified stars that contain enough heavy elements to form terrestrial planets; are sufficiently distant from disastrous supernova explosions; and have existed for at least four billion years - the time it took for complex life to evolve on Earth. Using a sophisticated computer evolution model, they found that ten percent of the stars in our galaxy, located in a ring around the center of the Milky Way, meet those criteria. Astronomers See Era Of Rapid Galaxy Formation; New Findings Pose A Challenge For Cold Dark Matter Theory Science Daily - January 9, 2004 "The universe is always more complicated than our cosmological theories would have it," says Nigel Sharp, program officer for extra-galactic astronomy and cosmology at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Witness a collection of new and recently announced discoveries that, taken together, suggest a considerably more active and fastmoving epoch of galaxy formation in the early universe than prevailing theories had called for. The findings, each of which was obtained at facilities supported in whole or in part by the NSF, include the following: Astrophysicists Discover Massive Forming Galaxies Science Daily - September 12, 2003 The forming galaxies were detected at sub-millimeter wavelengths.

Emission at these wavelengths is due to dust from young stars that is heated by the stars or by active black holes. The galaxies were grouped around high-red shift radio galaxies, the most massive systems known, suggesting that they all formed at approximately the same time. In the present universe, the most massive galaxies are elliptical galaxies, which are found in the centers of rich galaxy clusters. The stars in these galaxies are now old, and must have formed at much earlier times. The enormous bursts of star formation that build these galaxies produce large quantities of dust that can be observed at submillimeter wavelengths. Scientists Determine Large Magellanic Cloud Galaxy Formed Similar To Milky Way Science Daily - September 12, 2003 The oldest and most metal-poor Milky Way stars form a spherical halo where they move about like atoms in a hot gas, which in turn prompts two major formation scenarios of our galaxy: extended hierarchical accretion and rapid collapse. RR Lyrae stars, which are found both in the Milky Way and the LMC, are excellent tracers of old and metal-poor populations.

By measuring the movement of 43 RR Lyrae stars in the inner regions of the LMC, the team determined that a moving hot, metal-poor, old halo also exists in the LMC, suggesting that the Milky Way and smaller, more irregular galaxies like the LMC have similar early formation histories. Most distant galaxy detected - 12.8 billion light-years away BBC - March 2003 The Japanese Subaru Telescope has found a galaxy 12.8 billion light-years away, the most distant galaxy ever observed. This discovery is the first result from the Subaru Deep Field (SDF) project which has discovered about 70 distant galaxy candidates by using a special filter to locate galaxies around 13 billion light-years away. Researchers say the discovery raises hopes that they will be able to find a large number of distant galaxies that will help unravel the early history of the Universe in a statistically meaningful way.

They hope to find out more about the period between the Big Bang and the formation of the first stars and galaxies, after the mysterious so-called "dark ages" Milky Way's star 'doughnut' BBC - January 6, 2003 A vast, but previously unknown structure has been discovered around the edges of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The first large area surveys of the sky have revealed several hundred million stars surrounding the galaxy's main disc. The ring, which has the appearance of a giant doughnut, could be the remains of a satellite galaxy. Astronomers believe it could hold clues as to how the Milky Way and other galaxies evolved. Hubble watches galactic dance BBC - December 16, 2002 The Hubble Space Telescope is witnessing a cluster of galaxies perform a slow dance of destruction that will last billions of years. The galaxies' gravity is beginning to rip stars from them and distort their shapes. Eventually, they will merge to form one large galaxy. The grouping, called Seyfert's Sextet, implies that six galaxies are coming together but in reality only four are.

The small face-on spiral with the prominent arms of gas and stars is a background galaxy almost five times farther away than the other four. The sixth member of the sextet is not a galaxy at all but a river of stars torn from one of the galaxies. Galaxy's dark centre exposed BBC - October 2002 There now seems little doubt that a supermassive black hole resides at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Scientists say they have produced the best evidence yet to confirm the object's existence. It comes from observations of a fast-moving star which orbits close to the hole, referred to by astronomers as Sagittarius A* (its location in the sky is in the southern constellation Sagittarius) Spiral galaxy winds up astronomers BBC - February 11, 2002 This galaxy is spiraling backwards. The beautiful but strange galaxy NGC 4622 is confounding astronomers as it appears to break all the rules about how galaxies should rotate. All so-called spiral galaxies seem to rotate in such a way that the spiral arms are winding up, even though their galactic arms do not become crowded together because stars move in and out of them all the time.

This is the density wave theory that explains why the often beautiful stellar arms of a spiral galaxy are long-lived features and do not become smeared out. But the galaxy called NGC 4622 appears to be rotating in the opposite direction to that expected throwing astronomers into confusion. Our galaxy - from the outside BBC - January 31, 2002 This is our home galaxy as it might look if you could travel outside it and look back. Astronomers obtained this perspective by analyzing half a billion stars measured by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). It features the Milky Way's complete disc and its newly discovered central bar of stars. The new map will help scientists confirm the existence of hitherto only suspected features in our galaxy. Telescope snaps 'perfect spiral' BBC - October 2, 2001 The Gemini North Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea has taken a remarkable image of a galaxy 30 million light-years distant. Astronomers say the quality of the image demonstrates the great potential of a new instrument recently attached to the telescope. The new sensor is called GMOS, or the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph.

It is able to record the spectra of hundreds of objects in an image, something that will be useful in many branches of astronomy.

Question: What is "UDFy-38135539" which was calculated in October 2010 to be 13 billion light years away?
Answer: Galaxy