Hubble Creates New Cosmic Distance Record

The Hubble Space Telescope is certainly an engineering marvel, and it has not outlived its usefulness just yet. In fact, it looks as though it will be far from retiring at the moment, especially since it has smashed the cosmic distance record yet again by spotting the farthest galaxy to date, which technically speaking, is “travelling back in time” as one peers into what has happened so many, many, many years back.

It is said that the Hubble Space Telescope has calculated the distance to the most far-out galaxy ever measured, which has been given the name GN-z11. GN-z11 existed 400 million years after the Big Bang, and while 400 million years might sound like a really long time, do bear in mind that the Big Bang occurred approximately 13.3 billion years back. In other words, we are really peering back in time here.

Pascal Oesch, an astronomer at Yale University and lead author of the research paper announcing the new measurement, shared, “We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We managed to look back in time to measure the distance to a galaxy when the universe was only 3 percent of its current ag.”

Edwin Kee
Categories: General
Tags: Science