A possible galaxy that exists some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth has broken the record for farthest astronomical object ever seen.
That age places this collection of stars, now dubbed HD1, between a time of total darkness — about 14 billion years ago the universe was a blank slate devoid of any stars or galaxies — and one of just-burgeoning lights as clumps of dust and gas were growing into their cosmic destinies.
“The first galaxies formed about a hundred million years after the Big Bang. They were a millionth of the mass of the Milky Way and much denser,” study researcher and Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb told Live Science in an email. “One way to think of them is as the building blocks in the construction project of present-day galaxies, like our own Milky Way.”
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