EU-USA collaboration finds most distant galaxy yet discovered
A 'baby-galaxy', which could be one of the earliest yet observed, has been revealed by a collaboration between the European Space Agency/Nasa Hubble Space Telescope and the USA's Keck Telescopes. The small, faint galaxy was discovered at a distance of 13.4 billion light years from Earth by a unique collaboration between European and American astronomers. As the universe is estimated to be 14 billion light years old, the finding represents one of the earliest galaxies ever discovered. The observation was aided by the magnifying power of a giant cluster of galaxies, Abell 2218, just 2 billion light years from Earth. This cluster, containing thousands of galaxies, distorts and magnifies the light from the distant 'baby galaxy' in accordance with the 'redshift' phenomenon, where lights waves stretch as they travel across expanding space. Light from the early galaxy was magnified more than 30 times by Abell 2218. The team, led by Richard Ellis from the Californian Institute of Technology, found that the object is only around 500 light-years across, compared to the 100,000 light-year diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. Research team member Konrad Kuijken from the Kapteyn Institute, the Netherlands, said: 'We believe it is one of the galaxy building blocks that join together and make up larger galaxies later in the history of the universe. With this discovery, we may finally be witnessing the circumstance in which this first generation of stars was born.' Jean-Paul Kneib from the Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, France, said: 'When we realised what we had found, we literally jumped up and down.' The first galaxies in the universe hold invaluable clues that shed light on the period known as the cosmic 'dark Ages,' a period that lasted up to one billion years after the 'big bang' and ended when the first generation of stars appeared. The European Space Agency (ESA) is planning two different observatories to probe these distant regions of space and time: the Herschel Space Observatory and the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST), a collaborative project with Nasa and the Canadian Space Agency. NGST project scientist Peter Jakobsen said: 'The gravitational lensing provided by the foreground galaxy cluster is extremely powerful, but a bit hard to point in other directions! This young, faint galaxy is precisely the kind of object we hope to study in more detail with NGST - all over the sky.' NGST is planned for launch in 2009.