Thursday 21 October 2010

Galaxy is most distant object yet

The faintest of faint dots - a signal from the edge of the observable Univers. 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. 

Astronomers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to follow up the Hubble observation and make the necessary detailed measurements. 

They tell the journal Nature that we are seeing the galaxy as it was just 600 million years after the Big Bang.

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