Just two weeks ago astronomers found their most distant object ever, at about redshift 7, using the Hubble and Keck Telescopes. Now a different group, using one of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) reflectors of the European Southern Observatory, claims to have smashed that record using a similar technique. Roser Pello (Midi Observatory, Pyrenees, France) and four colleagues say they have identified an extremely faint galaxy fragment that has a redshift of 10.0. This would mean we see it as it was just 460 million years after the universe was born -- at just 3.5 percent of the present cosmic age -- when the "dark age" that followed the Big Bang was ending and the first stars and galaxies were being born....
posted by Marcus Zillman |
4:10 AM
