With the help of cosmic lenses, the earliest known galaxy has been discovered with the help of cosmic lenses.
Scientists estimate that the universe began around 13.7 billion years ago and recent studies suggest that the first galaxies formed less than 500 million years after the universe began.
There is not much that is known about the earliest galaxies but with tools such as gravitational lenses, which are magnifying glasses resulting from the warped fabric of reality, they are starting to be able to get a closer look.
Astronomers are able to gauge the age of an object by estimating distance. A space.com article explained, "Since the speed of light appears the same throughout the universe, knowing how far away an object is reveals how long it took for its light to get here. Scientists can work out the distance of an object by looking at how much the light from it is distorted."
With gravitational lensing scientists saw a galaxy that existed when the universe was 500 million years old approximately. They used two NASA space observations including the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Space.com reported," Based on its level of development, the researchers estimate this galaxy is about 150 million times the mass of the sun and formed less than 200 million years after the Big Bang."
The age of the galaxy reveals it was formed 150 to 800 million years after the Big Bang.
Astronomer Daniel Stark at the University of Arizona at Tucson told SPACE.com "This provides us with a unique glimpse of star formation and galaxy growth in the period spanning 300 [million] to 500 million years after the Big Bang," While caution should be exercised in the interpretation of a single object, the results presented in the Zheng paper point to significant star formation activity throughout this period."
The scientists published their findings in the journal, Nature on September 20.
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