Back in 2004, ESO astronomers using the ISAAC near-infrared instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) claimed that they had found a galaxy with a redshift of 10, equating to a time of when the universe was just 470 million years old. It turns out that no one else could find the galaxy.
Today, ESO astronomers using the VLT have claimed that they have found a galaxy with a redshift of 8.6, equating to a time of when the universe was just 600 million years old. This claim has been verified by observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. If the current theory of how the Universe was formed is true, then at this early time the Universe was still filled with a hydrogen fog that rendered it opaque to light. If the Universe was opaque at that time, how can we see the light of this galaxy? Although not yet found, there are probably other nearby galaxies that helped to clear out the local area of the hydrogen fog to allow this light to shine through.
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have measured the distance to the most remote galaxy so far, UDFy-38135539, which we see as it was when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6). This video uses images from the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field to visualise a zoom towards UDFy-38135539.
Credit: A. M. Swinbank and S. Zieleniewski, Music: movetwo
via : Clearing the Cosmic Fog
