Hubble breaks cosmic record, captures most distant galaxy - CNET

A faint galaxy imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope has shattered the distance record for how far we've seen into space. GN-z11, as it's known, located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major, is a massive 13.4 billion light-years away, a galaxy in its infancy just 400 million years after the universe came into being.

Previously, the farthest we had seen into space was 13.2 billion light-years, announced in October of last year. For this latest discovery, an inteational team of researchers pushed the Hubble Space Telescope's capabilities to their limits.

"We've taken a major step back in time, beyond what we'd ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only 3 percent of its current age," said principal investigator Pascal Oesch of Yale University.

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The first galaxies formed as early as 200 million years after the Big Bang, and galaxies can live for billions of years. The Milky Way galaxy, for instance, is thought to be at least 13.2 billion years old. This makes GN-z11 a very wee baby galaxy indeed.

To determine the age of galaxies, astronomers look at the redshift, or increase in wavelength to the red end of the spectrum. The higher the redshift value, the lower the frequency and photon energy of the wave, and the older the light is determined to be.