mosfire
Latest
The farthest known galaxy is 13.2 billion years old
Scientists have long reckoned that the first galaxies came into being roughly 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, but finding these ancient celestial bodies is tricky when their light is so faint that even many specialized tools aren't up to the job. However, researchers have managed to spot a galaxy so old that it's making them question the established timeline for the universe. They've determined that the recently discovered EGS8p7 galaxy is a whopping 13.2 billion years old, making it both the farthest known galaxy to date and just 600 million years younger than the universe as we know it. Theoretically, it shouldn't be possible to see the galaxy at all -- in EGS8p7's era, space was supposed to be full of neutral hydrogen clouds that absorbed radiation and made galaxies invisible to later observers.
