Discovered the most distant galaxy: 30 billion light years from Earth

Astronomers from the University of Texas A & M and the University of Texas at Austin discovered the most distant galaxy known to us. According to spectrographic data, it is located at a distance of about 30 billion light years from the solar system (or from our galaxy, which in this case is not so significant, because the diameter of the Milky Way is only 100 thousand light years).

The farthest object in the universe received the romantic name z8_GND_5296.

“It’s amazing to know that we are the first people in the world who saw it,” said Ph.D. Vithal Tilvi, co-author of a scientific paper that is now published online (for free viewing scientific papers use the website sci-hub.org ) .
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Discovered galaxy z8_GND_5296 formed 700 million years after the Big Bang. Actually, in this state, we see it now, because the light from the newborn galaxy has only now reached us, having traveled a distance of 13.1 billion light years. But since in the process of this the Universe expanded, then at this minute, as the calculations show, the distance between our galaxies is 30 billion light years.

In newborn galaxies, it is interesting that there is an active process of formation of new stars. If in our Milky Way one new star appears per year, then in z8_GND_5296 - about 300 per year. What happened 13.1 billion years ago, we can now calmly observe through telescopes.

The age of distant galaxies can be determined by the cosmological redshift, including the Doppler effect. The faster the object is removed from the observer, the more pronounced the Doppler effect. Galaxy z8_GND_5296 showed a redshift of 7.51. About a hundred galaxies have a red shift of more than 7, that is, they formed before the Universe turned 770 Ma, and the previous record was 7.215. But only in a few galaxies the distance is confirmed by spectrographic data, that is, by the Lyman alpha spectral line (see below).

The radius of the universe is at least 39 billion light years. It would seem that this contradicts the age of the Universe at 13.8 billion years, but there is no contradiction if we consider the expansion of the space-time fabric itself: there is no speed limit for this physical process.



Scientists do not quite understand why it is not possible to observe other galaxies under the age of 1 billion years. Remote galaxies are observed by a clear manifestation of the spectral line L _α (Lyman alpha), which corresponds to the transition of an electron from the second energy level to the first. For some reason, in galaxies under 1 billion years, the Lyman alpha line is becoming increasingly weak. One theory is that just at that time, the Universe was going from an opaque state with neutral hydrogen to a semi-transparent state with ionized hydrogen. We simply cannot see the galaxies that are hidden in the “fog” of neutral hydrogen.

How could z8_GND_5296 break through the fog of neutral hydrogen? Scientists suggest that it ionized the nearest neighborhood, so that the protons could break through. Thus, z8_GND_5296 is the very first galaxy known to us, which came out of an opaque mess of neutral hydrogen that filled the Universe in the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.