Today the top science story is the new finding by Hubble that using the amplifying power of a cosmic gravitational lens, astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy whose stars were born unexpectedly early in cosmic history. This result sheds new light on the formation of the first galaxies, as well as on the early evolution of the Universe.

Johan Richard, the lead author of a new study and says: “We have discovered a distant galaxy that began forming stars just 200 million years after the Big Bang. This challenges theories of how soon galaxies formed and evolved in the first years of the Universe. It could even help solve the mystery of how the hydrogen fog that filled the early Universe was cleared.”

The distant galaxy is visible through a cluster of galaxies called Abell 383, which has a very strong gravity bends the rays of light almost like a magnifying glass. The chance alignment of the galaxy, the cluster and the Earth amplifies the light reaching us from this distant galaxy, allowing the astronomers to make detailed observations. Without this gravitational lens, the galaxy would have been too faint to be observed even with today’s largest telescopes.

The redshift for this galaxy is 6.027 or according to the BigBang that makes this a 950 million years old galaxy. There has been other finds with galaxies older at around 400 million years from BigBang - but and they had mainly young stars that shin brightly.

Dan Stark explains that: “When we looked at the spectra, two things were clear,” explains co-author Eiichi Egami. “The redshift placed it very early in cosmic history, as we expected. But the Spitzer infrared detection also indicated that the galaxy was made up of surprisingly old and relatively faint stars. This told us that the galaxy was made up of stars already nearly 750 million years old — pushing back the epoch of its formation to about 200 million years after the Big Bang, much further than we had expected.”

Thanks to the amplification of the galaxy’s light by the gravitational lens, we have some excellent quality data. Our work confirms some earlier observations that had hinted at the presence of old stars in early galaxies. This suggests that the first galaxies have been around for a lot longer than previously thought.”

This discovery has number of implications the one I am interested in is that this galaxy was mainly formed only 200 million years after the big bang. Therefore, not only stars were formed, but also in just 200 million years there were enough of them to form a galaxy. This is a little to short time for all these to happen. Hopefully when NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch later this decade. It will specialise in high resolution observations of distant, highly redshifted objects. It will therefore be in an ideal position to solve this mystery once and for all.

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