Scientists discover oldest and farthest galaxy till date, located 13.4 billion light-years

Astronomers have discovered what they think is the farthest and the oldest galaxy ever observed using the Keck I telescope. Termed as ‘GN-z11’, the galaxy is so distant that it defines the ‘observable universe itself’, says the press release by the University of Tokyo. With this finding, the researchers aim to establish a period of cosmological history when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. The research was led by Nobunari Kashikawa, a professor in the department of astronomy at the University of Tokyo. 

A new discovery 

Talking about this adventure, Kashikawa said, “From previous studies, the galaxy GN-z11 seems to be the farthest detectable galaxy from us, at 13.4 billion light-years, or 134 nonillion kilometers (that’s 134 followed by 30 zeros),” said Kashikawa. “But measuring and verifying such a distance is not an easy task”. As a part of the research, Kashikawa and his team also measured the  redshift of GN-z11. This is the way the light stretches out, becomes redder, the farther it travels. Also, emission lines imprint distinct patterns in the light from distant objects. 

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“We looked at ultraviolet light specifically, as that is the area of the electromagnetic spectrum we expected to find the redshifted chemical signatures. The Hubble Space Telescope detected the signature multiple times in the spectrum of GN-z11. However, even the Hubble cannot resolve ultraviolet emission lines to the degree we needed. So we turned to a more up-to-date ground-based spectrograph, an instrument to measure emission lines, called MOSFIRE, which is mounted to the Keck I telescope in Hawaii”, said Kashikawa.

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MOSFIRE helped in capturing the emission lines from GN-z11 in detail. This helped the team in determining a much better estimation on its distance. The accuracy was further improved by the galaxy’s z value by a factor of 100. Kashikawa was further accompanied by Linhua Jiang, Nobunari Kashikawa, Shu Wang, Gregory Walth, Luis C. Ho, Zheng Cai, Eiichi Egami, Xiaohui Fan, Kei Ito, Yongming Liang, Daniel Schaerer and Daniel P. Stark. The work has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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