Galaxies
With the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have found a very old galaxy. Or very young, it's just how you look. The galaxy is 13 billion light years away.
This galaxy was formed 500 million years after the Big Bang. It is one of the first galaxies in the universe. Because the light has traveled 13 billion years to reach us, we see the galaxy in its infancy. But in reality this galaxy is 13 billion years older, and therefore probably one of the oldest galaxies in the universe.
The galaxy has a diameter of 850 light years. This makes this group of stars 500 times smaller than our Milky Way. The distant galaxy has a mass of only forty sunbathing million. In the system every three years there is a single star.
Although there is a lot higher in the Milky this rate (one new star a year), scientists expect that the slow star formation process has to do with the fact that this is one of the first galaxies.
Gravitational Lens
What scientists have found this faint galaxy? The researchers have used the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The cluster is for the distant galaxy and acts as a kind of cosmic lens. Because the cluster is so massive, it is able to bend light from underlying galaxies. Because of this we do not see one the same galaxy, but three times. In addition, the underlying galaxy ten times bigger and brighter than without the cosmic lens.
The first stars
The search for distant galaxies continues. Scientists hope this century watching the first stars. That way they can the story of the origin of the universe and the evolution of the first stars and galaxies further grinding. This requires new telescopes that can look further. There in the coming years many beautiful telescopes such as the James Webb telescope (the successor to Hubble) .
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