With some help from a gravitational phenomenon, an international team of scientists say they found a galaxy 13 billion light years away while using the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea.
With some help from a gravitational phenomenon, an international team of scientists say they found a galaxy 13 billion light years away while using the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea.
The tiny galaxy — the faintest yet to be detected — would have formed just after the Big Bang while the universe was a mere toddler, the observatory said.
The twin 10-meter Keck telescopes are among the world’s most powerful.
But it was through an effect known as “gravitational lensing” that made the discovery possible.
The phenomenon, predicted by Albert Einstein, occurs when an “object is magnified by the gravity of another object between it and the viewer,” according to the observatory.
In this case, the larger object was a galaxy cluster massive enough to create three separate images of the newly discovered galaxy.
“If the light from this galaxy was not magnified by factors of 11, five and two, we would not have been able to see it,” said Kuang-Han Huang, one of the researchers, in a press release. Huang, lead author of the report, works at University of California-Davis.
The early galaxy was minuscule, with a mass 1 percent of 1 percent that of the Milky Way.
Keck astronomer Marc Kassis said the discovery will help answer one of the fundamental questions surrounding the early universe: What caused hydrogen gas to go from neutral to ionized about 13 billion years ago?
“That’s when stars turned on and matter became more complex,” he said in the release.
Email Tom Callis at tcallis@hawaiitribune-herald.com.