14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope announce the discovery of one of the youngest and most distant galaxies ever found. The object, named Abell2744_Y1, lies no less than 13 billion light-years away from Earth, and appears as if it is very young.
The light we are seeing from the object today was emitted when the galaxy was just a few hundreds of millions of years old. In all likelihood, Abell2744_Y1 is an extremely red galaxy today, and all stellar formation has stopped long ago, Space reports.
Using infrared observations from the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope and X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain have confirmed that the galaxy is less than 30 times the size of the Milky Way, and that it formed 650 million years after the Big Bang.
In its earliest days, the young object produced new, blue stars at 10 times the current stellar production rate we see in our galaxy. Additionally, Spitzer identified massive gas reserves, which most likely fueled this growth for billions of years afterwards.