The Most Distant Galaxy in the Universe So Far

Watch this and other space videos at SpaceRip.com From ESOCast An international team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope has measured the distance to the most remote galaxy so far. This is the first time that astronomers have been able to confirm that they are observing a galaxy as it was in the era of reionization — when the first generation of brilliant stars was making the young Universe transparent and ending the cosmic Dark Ages. We are going to find out how a team of astronomers used ESO's Very Large Telescope, the VLT, to confirm that a galaxy that had previously been spotted in images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is in fact the most distant object that is ever been identified in the Universe. Studying these first galaxies is extremely difficult; they are very faint and small and by the time their dim light gets to Earth it falls mostly in the infrared part of the spectrum because it has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe. To make matters worse, at this very early time, less than a billion years after the Big Bang, the Universe was not completely transparent. It was filled with hydrogen which acted kind of like a fog and absorbed the ultraviolet radiation from the young galaxies. So, holding the record for having measured the redshift of the most distant object in the Universe is not just a trophy to hang on the wall, it does have important astrophysical implications. This is the first time that we've managed to obtain ...