Z8_GND_5296 is Universe’s most distant galaxy

Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin may be former football rivals, but there's a new most distant galaxy ever found, created within 700 million years after the Big Bang.

The galaxy is z8_GND_5296. Unlike our Milky Way, which creates about 1 or 2 Sun-like stars every year or so, this newly discovered galaxy forms around 300 per year and was observed by the researchers as it was 13 billion years ago. Because the universe has been expanding the whole time, the researchers estimate the galaxy’s present distance to be roughly 30 billion light years away.

The paper is the result of raw data gleaned from a powerful Hubble Space Telescope imaging survey of the distant universe called CANDELS, or Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey. Using that data, the team was armed with 43 potential distant galaxies and set out to confirm their distances.

Researchers are able to accurately gauge the distances of galaxies by measuring a feature from the ubiquitous element hydrogen called the Lyman alpha transition, which emits brightly in distant galaxies. It’s detected in nearly all galaxies that are seen from a time more than one billion years from the Big Bang, but getting closer than that, the hydrogen emission line, for some reason, becomes increasingly difficult to see.

“Because of its distance we get a glimpse of conditions when the universe was only about 700 million years old — only 5 percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years,” said Texas A&M astrophysicist Casey Papovich, co-author of the paper in Nature.