A distant red smudge is thought to be the farthest galaxy ever seen.
The image of the galaxy was taken using the Near IR camera, which can peer back in time to the very first stars.
The new result, which is still preliminary and has yet to be confirmed by studying the spectrum of the light, has already broken a previous record set by the telescope just a week ago.
You can see the deepest image ever taken of our universe.
Light has a finite speed and so it travels further back in time. The wavelength of light from the oldest and most distant galaxies gets stretched out by billions of years of travel across the expanding fabric of space-time in a process known as redshift.
The researchers who outlined their findings in a paper posted July 26 to the preprint database arXiv found that the newly discovered galaxy has a record-breaking redshift of 16.7, which means its light has been stretched to be nearly 18 times redder than if it had been expanded Peer-reviewed findings have not yet been published.
After being launched from French Guiana atop an Ariane 5 rocket, the telescope was placed at a location known as a Lagrange point, where it can be isolated from heat signals on Earth.
NASA engineers adjusted the telescope's instruments and mirror segments in order to snap the first images. Their progress was temporarily halted after the telescope was struck by a micrometeoroid. The telescope's performance seems to have not been affected by the damage to the mirror caused by the impact.
The telescope released its first images on July 12 and since then it has been uploading photos of fascinating distant objects to the web. A new record-breaking image was obtained during the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey.
The researchers didn't look for the most distant recorded galaxy. They compiled a list of 55 early galaxies, which had been observed previously, to see how bright they were at various points in the past.
Analyzing the magnitude of light across a range of wavelengths will be used to confirm the age of the galaxy. The device uses tiny, 0.1 millimeter-long, 0.2 millimeter-wide mirrors that only let in light from target galaxies, tuning out background radiation to break down a galaxy's stars by color The age of the light of the galaxies will be revealed by this effort.
The first stars, which were formed from collapsing gas clouds around 100 million years ago, are thought to be composed of lighter elements. Oxygen, carbon, lead, and gold are some of the heavier elements that were formed by later stars.
It's highly unlikely that this is the farthest galaxy we will see because of the amazing rate of discoveries and the fact that it can look as far back as 100 million years after the Bigbang. The telescope is likely to break its own records a lot more in the coming months.
It was originally published on Live Science
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