NASA says its Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, working in cosmos-observing tandem, have spotted the magnified image of the faintest galaxy ever from the very early universe.
The object, from around 400 million years after the birth of the universe in the Big Bang, is an example of a small, faint class of newly-forming galaxies that have largely evaded detection until now, astronomers say.
The distant object has been nicknamed "Tayna," meaning "first-born" in the Aymara language of peoples in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America.
The dim object should offer new insights into the formation and evolution of the universe's earliest galaxies, astronomers say in their study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal.
"Thanks to this detection, the team has been able to study for the first time the properties of extremely faint objects formed not long after the Big Bang," says lead author and astronomer Leopoldo Infante from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
The discovery of more than 20 young galaxies, including Tayna, from ancient times and located at nearly the observable edge of the universe, represents a significant increase in the number of extremely distant galaxies discovered to date.
Tayna is making new stars at a rapid rate, the astronomers say, and could be the evolving core of what is likely to end up as a full-sized galaxy.
The object is so distant and so faint, it was detectable only through a natural cosmic "magnifying glass," a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.
A massive cluster of galaxies around four billion light-years from us, known as MACS0416.1-2043, is acting like a powerful lens to bend and magnify the lights of distant, faint objects far behind it, astronomers explain.
The cluster's gravity is boosting the light coming from the distant Tayna protogalaxy, making it appear 20 times brighter than it would otherwise, they say.
Combined observations from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes yielded a color profile of the distant object that allowed astronomers to estimate its distance from Earth.
As the universe expands, light emitted by distant galaxies has its wavelengths stretched into the red end of the spectrum.
Tayna is so distant, its light has been shifted into the infrared, to wavelengths that both Spitzer and Hubble can measure, the researchers say.
They suggest their finding means the early universe will provide a rich array of galaxy targets for the upcoming successor to Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, when it launches in 2018.
