Gregory Waith News Today

  An international team of astronomers has confirmed the most-distant known galaxy, GN-z11s, a hefty13.4 billion light years away, indicating it was shining just 400 million years or so after the Big Bang, along with a brief ultraviolet flare of a powerful gamma ray burst–a phenomenon never before observed in the extremely early universe–that was detected in data from the Keck 1 telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The astronomers used deep spectroscopic analysis, discovering ...

An illustration showing a flare from a gamma ray burst in the most distant known galaxy, a brief burst of ultraviolet radiation that took 13.4 billion years to reach Earth. Image: Jingchuan Yu An international team of astronomers has confirmed the most-distant known galaxy is, in fact, a mind-boggling 13.4 billion light years away, indicating it was shining just 400 million years or so after the Big Bang. As an added bonus, the team spotted the brief ultraviolet flare of a powerful gamma ray bu...