Galaxy of about 8 redshift and about 2,300 light-years width
Main Point:
Astronomers have reported the discovery of one of the most distant galaxies, dubbed Abell2744 Y1.
Published in:
Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters
Study Further:
Redshift and previous findings:
Redshift refers to a shift in the spectrum of a celestial body toward longer wavelengths, or toward the red end of the spectrum, caused by its motion away from the Earth.
Previously, scientists reported a galaxy dubbed MACS1149-JD1 at a redshift of about 10, i.e. the galaxy came into being just after about 500 million years of the Big Bang event, and then there is the report of another galaxy, dubbed MACS0647-JD at the redshift of about 11, i.e. galaxy about 13.3 billion light years old. MACS0647-JD is probably the farthest known galaxy known to humanity.
Present Study:
Abell2744 Y1 has a redshift of about 8 showing that the age of the Universe was about 0.6 billion years, i.e. 5% of the age of the Universe today. This also shows that while looking at this galaxy, scientists are actually looking at something that was present about 13.14 billion years ago.
Abell2744 Y1 has width of about 2,300 light-years. Though, this width is 50 times less than our Milky Way Galaxy but still it is found to producing 10 times more stars than our Galaxy, which is the characteristic of the galaxies present in the young Universe.
Abell2744 Y1 has been found by using NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and a gravitational lens produced by the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. This finding was the part of NASA’s Frontier Fields program that was designed to see the remote parts of Universe.
“The nature of this candidate will be revealed in the coming months with the arrival of new ACS and Spitzer data, increasing the depth at optical and near-IR wavelengths,” Researchers wrote.
Reference:
N. Laporte, A. Streblyanska, B. Clement, I. Pérez-Fournon, D. Schaerer, H. Atek, F. Boone, J.-P. Kneib, E. Egami, P. Martínez-Navajas, R. Marques-Chaves, R. Pelló, J. Richard (2014). The first Frontier Fields cluster: 4.5mum excess in a z-8 galaxy candidate in Abell 2744 Astronomy & Astrophysics DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201323179
