Using the combined power of the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, astronomers have found the cosmic equivalent of a minnow in a shark pond: the faintest object ever to be detected in the early universe—some 13.8 billion years ago (or 400 million years after the Big Bang).
The object, which was discovered by a team led by Leopoldo Infante of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, has been called Tayna, which means “first-born” in Aymara, a language that is spoken in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America, according to HubbleSite.
While Hubble and Spitzer have detected other galaxies that are more distant than Tayna, this new object represents a smaller, fainter class of young galaxies which had previously evaded detection, the researchers said. Not only is this extremely dim object likely more representative of the early universe, it could also shed new light on how these first galaxies formed and evolved.
“Thanks to this detection, the team has been able to study for the first time the properties of extremely faint objects formed not long after the big bang,” Infante said in a statement. Tayna is one of 22 young galaxies dating back to from ancient discovered near the observable horizon of the universe, significantly increasing the number of known distant galaxies.
More powerful telescopes may lead to more such discoveries
As the researchers reported in a recent edition of The Astrophysical Journal, Tayna is nearly the same size as the Large Magellanic Cloud and is producing stars at a rate 10-times faster than that of the Milky Way’s tiny satellite galaxy. They believe that this small, faint galaxy could actually be the growing core of what may someday evolve into a full-sized galaxy.
Tayna was spotted due in part of the use of gravitational lensing. As part of the Hubble Frontier Fields program, the telescope located a massive cluster of galaxies located four billion light years from Earth, which scientists then used like a natural magnifying glass or zoom lens to get a look at far more distant objects located behind the large cluster.
According to Infante and his co-authors, the distance of the galaxy was estimated through the construction of a color profile from combined Hubble and Spitzer observations. Because of the expansion of the universe, light from far-off galaxies tends to be increasingly stretched or red in color the more distant they are, the study authors said. They also believe that many more such galaxies may be out there, waiting to be detected by next-gen space telescopes.
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Feature Image: NASA, ESA, and L. Infante (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)
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