Faint Galaxy From Early Universe Is Spotted

They’ve harnessed the combined power of NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to reveal the faintest object seen, existing 13.8 billion years ago. A name fitting the ancient galaxy perfectly as the astronomers team dated the galaxy to 400 million years following the Big Bang.

Nicknamed as Tayna, which means the “first born” in Aymara representing a language that is spoken in Altiplano and Andes regions of South America, the object is likely to offer a clue to the evolution and formation of the initial galaxies.

Leopold Infante of the Pontifical Catholic University in Chile said, “Thanks to the detection, the team has been able to study for the first time the properties of extremely faint objects formed not long after the Big Bang”.

The finding is actually part of a bigger project in which have been discovered 22 galaxies from ancient times. The remote object resembles the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in size.

Astronomers used both the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes in attempts that led to Tayna’s discovery, which came through a technique known as gravitational lensing.

The discovery has astronomers excited about the potential of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is slated to launch into orbit sometime in 2018. And it’s working incredibly hard, cranking out stars 10 times the rate of the Large Magellanic Cloud, indicating it was rapidly heading to a full-sized galaxy at the time.

What Hubble and Spitzer have caught is a smaller fish. As part of its Frontier Fields program, Hubble observed a massive cluster of galaxies, MACS0416.1-2403, located roughly 4 billion light-years away.

Researchers have spotted the faintest galaxy from the early universe.

Astronomers have discovered the faintest ever object yet in the universe with the help of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. As such, the scientists who discovered it claim that it has the potential to become the core of a much, much vaster galaxy.

That effect made “Tayna” appear 20 times brighter than normal, making it possible for astronomers to observe it for the first time.

Its distance was estimated by building a color profile from combined Hubble and Spitzer observations. What’s even more attractive is discovering that there are more than just stars in the sky – there are immeasurable galaxies that have yet to be discovered. Absorption by intervening, cool, intergalactic hydrogen also makes the galaxies look redder.