A faint glow first spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope belongs to a galaxy that is the most distant object yet found, new observations suggest. The galaxy helps provide a window into the primordial cosmos, when a thick fog gave way to the transparent universe we see today.
The Astronomical Research Center (A.R.C) mentioned that the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 picked up the object as a dim infrared blob in observations made in August and September 2009.
It was suspected to be a very distant galaxy because its light is strongly reddened or skewed towards longer wavelengths, as expected for light that has travelled for billions of years to reach Earth. The intervening expansion of the universe stretches light waves, pushing them to longer, redder wavelengths.
But astronomers initially could not rule out the possibility that the object might be intrinsically red and much closer to Earth, such as a brown dwarf star in our own galaxy. The Hubble camera is not equipped to measure the detailed light spectrum needed to distinguish between such possibilities.
Now, follow-up observations made with an 8.2-metre telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile suggest the object sits far outside the Milky Way. Its light appears to be more than 13.1 billion years old, making it the most distant object confirmed to date.