Nasa announcement: Hubble spots oldest and most distant galaxy yet

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Astronomers have discovered the oldest and most distant object in the universe - a galaxy so far away that its light has taken 13.2billion years to reach Earth.The cluster of stars, dust and gas was spotted by Nasa's Hubble space telescope as it orbited Earth.The galaxy is so remote, scientists are observing it at a time when the universe was in its infancy, just 480million years after the Big Bang.Dr Garth Illingworth, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said: 'We're getting back very close to the first galaxies which we think formed around 200 or 300million years after the Big Bang.'Every time astronomers gaze into space, they are looking back in time.

Farthest reach: The new galaxy is just one hundredth of the size of our own Milky Way and is 13.2billion light years away or 80 sextillion miles - 80 followed by 21 zeroes

Pick that one out: This larger image, the deepest picture of the sky ever taken, was obtained by Nasa's Hubble space telescope. Look to the centre, upper left for the galaxy pulled out in the picture above
Thelight from nearby stars takes just a few years to reach the Earth. But light from distant stars and galaxies takes millions or billions of years to travel across space.Thenew galaxy was detected using Hubble's eight-foot wide mirror and Wide Field Planetary Camera 3, a device fitted to the spacecraft in 2009 which takes astonishingly detailed pictures.
It is just one hundredth of the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, the researchers report in the journal Nature.

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Thedistances involved are incomprehensible. The newly discovered galaxy is13.2billion light years away or 80 sextillion miles - 80 followed by 21zeroes.The researchers also found three other ancient galaxies from a similar era. However, to find even older galaxies, they will have to wait for the launch of Hubble's replacement, the James Webb Telescope later this decade.
The scientists were also able to see dramatic changes in the way galaxies formed when the universe was still young.
In the period between 480 to 650million years after the Big Bang, the rate of star birth in the universe increased ten-fold.
Dr Illingworth said: 'This is an astonishing increase in such a short period - just one per cent of the current age of the universe.'Our previous searches had found 47 galaxies at somewhat later times when the universe was about 650 million years old. However, we could only find one galaxy candidate just 170million years earlier. The universe was changing very quickly in a short amount of time.'Scientists work out the distance of galaxies by studying the wavelength of their light reaching the Earth.
Most of the light from far distant galaxies falls in the infra-red spectrum because its wavelength has been stretched by the expansion of the universe, a phenomenon known as redshift.