Astronomical distances: The farthest galaxy to date

Humanity has achieved much since the invention of the telescope. We now have the technological capabilities to send highly mechanized large telescopes into space to see farther into the cosmos than we have ever seen before. In an effort to highlight a prime example of such success, recently, an international team of astronomers led by Yale University and UC Santa Cruz have discovered a galaxy that is more than 13 billion years old and have precisely measured the distance to it! The galaxy has been labeled EGZ-zs8-1, and it is the farthest galaxy observed to date. From some heavy physical analysis, the team has concluded that this galaxy is extremely active, meaning that it is forming stars at an incredibly fast rate. "It has already built more than 15% of the mass of our own Milky Way today," said Pascal Oesch, a Yale astronomer and lead author of the study. "But it had only 670 million years to do so. The universe was still very young then." To put it into perspective, it is forming stars 80 times faster than our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, how exactly did the team go about measuring an accurate distance to the EGZ-zs8-1? The original identification of the galaxy was provided by NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, but the distance was measured by a device called the MOSFIRE instrument loaded on the W.M. Keck Observatory's 10-meter telescope in Hawaii. It is a multi-object spectrograph that can analyze physical phenomena in the infrared band of light. Using these technologies in conjunction allowed scientists to discern the peculiar colors of the early, massive galaxies and assisted in the understanding of star formation in the early Universe.
For more information: http://phys.org/news/2015-05-astronomers-unveil-farthest-galaxy.html#nRlv