Scientists have discovered the most distant and ancient galaxy ever spotted.
By using data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope and observations from the Keck I telescope at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, astronomers have now confirmed that the galaxy designated z8_GND_5296 formed within 700 million years after the beginning of the universe, making it the oldest and most distant galaxy ever verified.
Because the galaxy is so far from Earth, scientists were able to observe z8_GND_5296 as it would have appeared about 13.1 billion years ago.
“The most exciting aspect in general of what I do is the fact that we can learn about what things were like in the very early universe,” Steven Finkelstein, the lead author of the new galaxy study in Nature and an astronomer at the University of Texas, Austin, said. “Because the speed of light is constant, light…
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James' World 2 
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