Astronomers Take a 13-Billion Year Look Back Into Time With Telescope

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have peered 13 billion years back into time, almost to the dawn of creation, to find the oldest, most distant object ever detected: a galaxy fizzing with stars that were new when the light was emitted from the galaxy. It lies near the edge of the universe, 13 billion light-years from Earth, where its presence was detected by its faint ultraviolet light.

By some estimates, researchers are seeing the galaxy as it existed only 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the colossal explosion believed to have created the universe. The discovery by researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook is reported in today’s Nature.

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Compiled by Times medical writer Thomas H. Maugh II