Oesch breaks galaxy distance record with discovery
Wed, 05/06/2015
Yale Postdoc Pascal Oesch led an international team of astronomers in discovering the most distant galaxy currently measured. The discovery has pushed back the cosmic frontier of galaxy exploration to a time when the universe was only 5 percent of its present age of 13.8 billion years.
The team determined the exact distance from Earth of this exceptionally luminous galaxy using the combined data from NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and the Keck I 10-meter telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The galaxy existed so long ago, it appears to be only 100 million years old.
The paper, led by Oesch, is published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.