The galaxy EGS-zs8-1 is the most distant galaxy yet found in the universe, as seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image from the CANDELS survey NASA, ESA, P. Oesch and I. Momcheva (Yale University), and the 3D-HST and HUDF09/XDF Teams

A team of astronomers has spotted the most distant galaxy from Earth to date, more than 13 billion light years away.

Researchers from Yale University and UC Santa Cruz found the intensely bright cluster of stars, dubbed the EGS-zs8-1, from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Although the galaxy was first spotted in images taken by the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, the team used the new MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration) instrument on the Keck's ten-metre telescope to observe light shifts pinpointing its location.


If the measurements of the study, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, are precise, the EGS-zs8-1 is only just younger than the Big Bang and was formed around 670 million years after the creation of our own galaxy. Furthermore, because it takes 13.1 billion years for the light from the EGS-zs8-1 to reach us, we're essentially glimpsing back in time to when the galaxy was first born.

Pascal Oesch, lead author of the research, commented in a statement: "While we saw the galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago, it had already built more than 15 percent of the mass of our own Milky Way today. But it had only 670 million years to do so. The Universe was still very young then."

The team plans to continue to study the EGS-zs8-1 and its impact on the origins of the Universe once the James Webb telescope -- the Hubble's successor -- is launched in 2018. Co-author Garth Illingworth said: "Our current observations indicate that it will be very easy to measure accurate distances to these distant galaxies in the future with the James Webb Space Telescope."

He continued: "The result of JWST's upcoming measurements will provide a much more complete picture of the formation of galaxies at the cosmic dawn."