By Ron Cowen
Aided by a cosmic magnifying glass, astronomers may have found a baby picture of the most distant galaxy known. Its faint spectra suggest that it lies about 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, exceeding the current record holder by about 300 million light-years (SN: 3/30/02, p. 196: Available to subscribers at Long Ago and Far Away: Astronomers find distant galaxy, early cluster). If that’s true, the galaxy would hail from a time when the universe was a mere 470 million years old.
To find the galaxy, Daniel Schaerer of the Geneva Observatory in Sauverny, Switzerland, and his colleagues examined the central region of a relatively nearby cluster of galaxies, Abell 1835. The cluster’s enormous mass acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying, brightening, and distorting images of more-distant galaxies. The astronomers used an infrared detector on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Paranal, Chile.