Astronomers Discover Universe's Most Distant Galaxy

Researchers have detected the farthest galaxy ever confirmed spectroscopically. Simply known as z8_GND_5296, the galaxy is estimated to have been born within 700 million years after the Big Bang.

"It's exciting to know we're the first people in the world to see this," Vithal Tilvi, a Texas A&M postdoctoral research associate and co-author of the paper, said in a statement. "It raises interesting questions about the origins and the evolution of the universe."

The galaxy, which produces 300 Sun-like stars annually (the Milky Way creates just one or two), was observed by the researchers as it was 13 billion years ago. Because the universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang, the scientists estimate it is located roughly 30 billion light-years away.

As a result, the researchers are able to literally peer back in time.

"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.

The scientists believe they may have opened a window into a time when the universe was transitioning from an opaque state in which the majority of the hydrogen was neutral, to a translucent one, in which the element is ionized. This shift, as well as a transition from a plasma state to a neutral state, is one of the major events that have shaped the universe into what it is today.

"Everything seems to have changed since then," Tilvi said. "If it was neutral everywhere today, the night sky that we see wouldn't be as beautiful. What I'm working on is studying exactly why and exactly where this happened. Was this transition sudden, or was it gradual?"