Friday, November 16, 2012
It's called "MACS0647-JD." And as far as earthly astonomers are concerned, they've seen nothing farther away from Earth, ever.
The galaxy is almost 14 Billion light years from us. That's 420 million years after the so-called Big Bang.
That puts the images seen now at about the time the universe was being formed.
This is the latest discovery from a large program that uses the Hubble space telescope, the Spitzer space telescope, and "natural zoom lenses" from star clusters that bend space and time to reveal distant galaxies in the early universe.
Bending space and time, you recall, is the stuff of "Star Trek."
The Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH) is using massive galaxy clusters as cosmic telescopes to magnify distant galaxies behind them, an effect called gravitational lensing, according to Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.