NASA Discover New Galaxies Far Far Away
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Galaxy cluster exists 10 billion light years from Earth.
NASA have discovered a new collection of galaxies over 10 billion light years away in the furthest reaching discovery of its kind.
The Chandra X-Ray Observatory found the new galaxy cluster which sits about 58 quintillion miles from Earth (that’s 58 with 18 zeros after it). Because light takes so long to travel the immense distance from the newly discovered galaxy cluster to Earth, images captured by NASA’s appropriately named Very Large Telescope (VLT) are actually viewing the way the Universe looked when it was just a quarter of the age it is today.
The galaxies, collectively known as JKCS041 were initially observed by British scientists in Bristol three years ago by the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). At the time, UKIRT was unable to determine whether the collection was a true galaxy cluster or an emerging cluster which was forming on the frontier of space.
With NASA’s X-Ray technology the discovery was legitimately found to be a true cluster. JKCS041 represents the furthest object ever detected from space, some one billion light years further away than the previous record holding discovery.
Dr Ben Maughan from the University of Bristol explained that the discovery was the equivalent of an archaeologist finding a dinosaur fossil that was far older than anyone had previously thought possible. “One fossil might just fit in with our understanding of dinosaurs, but if you found many more you would have to start rethinking how dinosaurs evolved,” he told the BBC, “The same is true for galaxy clusters and our understanding of cosmology.”
Scientists now hope to find further discoveries of the evolution of galaxies through their observations of JKCS041. It provides an “opportunity to find important information about how the Universe evolved at this crucial stage,” NASA commented in a statement.
