Even as it celebrates its 25th anniversary, the Hubble Space Telescope is still breaking records and pulling off amazing feats, as it has just set a new cosmic distance record by measuring how far it is to the most remove galaxy yet discovered in the universe.

The galaxy is question is named GN-z11, and an international team of astronomers were able to use the venerable space telescope to measure the galaxy, which existed a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang, the European Space Agency explained in a statement.

The research, which is detailed in research now available online and set to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, marks the first time that an the distance of an object so far from Earth has been reliably measured, and it may provide new insight into the earliest galaxies ever formed.

Previously, astronomers had estimated the distance of GN-z11 by analyzing its color in images obtained by Hubble and the Spitzer Space Telescope, and they believed they would not be able to actually measure its distance until the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched.

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However, using the Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, they were able to precisely and spectroscopically measure the distance to the galaxy by splitting the light it emitted into each of its component colors and measuring the redshift of the object, the astronomers explained.

“Our spectroscopic observations reveal the galaxy to be even further away than we had originally thought,” said second author Gabriel Brammer from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Their analysis places GN-z11 “right at the distance limit of what Hubble can observe,” he added.

The previous record-holder, EGSY8p7, had a redshift of 8.68. GN-z11 was discovered to have a redshift of 11.1, which the researchers report corresponds to 400 million years following the Big Bang. As the galaxy was unexpectedly bright, its distance measurements suggest that previously discovered, unusually bright galaxies may also be further away than expected.

“The previous record-holder was seen in the middle of the epoch when starlight from primordial galaxies was beginning to heat and lift a fog of cold, hydrogen gas,” co-author Rychard Bouwens of the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, explained. “GN-z11 is observed 150 million years earlier, near the very beginning of this transition in the evolution of the Universe.”

“It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form,” added Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “This new discovery shows that JWST will surely find many such young galaxies reaching back to when the first galaxies were forming.”

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Image credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble

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