GN-z11, the remotest galaxy yet discovered.

[SciTechPress]

Astronomers use the Hubble Space Telescope to discover GN-z11, the remotest galaxy yet discovered. 

GN-z11 is a high-redshift galaxy found at the constellation Ursa Major. GN-z11 has a spectroscopic redshift ofz = 11.1, an age of 13.4 billion years, and is observed as it existed 400 million years after the Big Bang that occurred 13.8 billion years ago.

As of March 3, 2016, GN-z11 is the most distant known galaxy in the Universe. GN-z11 was identified by a team studying data from the Hubble Space Telescope's CANDELS and GOODS-North surveys.

“Right now, we expect this galaxy to be about 32 billion light-years away from us in distance,” per study coauthor Pascal Oesch of Yale University.

The research team used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to measure the distance to GN-z11 spectroscopically, by splitting the light into its component colors to measure the redshift caused by the expansion of the universe.

GN-z11 is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way and has 1% of the Milky Way galaxy’s mass in stars. GN-z11 is growing forming stars at a rate about 20 times faster than the Milky Way galaxy does today.

The study authors said: “It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form”, “It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses (one solar mass is equal to the mass of the Sun) so soon.”

“The discovery of this unexpectedly bright galaxy at such a great distance challenges some of our current theoretical models for the build-up of galaxies,” “Larger area datasets are now needed to measure how common such bright galaxies really are so early in the history of the universe.”