Meet Tayna: The Faintest Ancient Galaxy Ever Found - A newly found early galaxy is the faintest ever discovered, and it's giving scientists a rare look into how ancient galaxies evolved.
To peer into the distant cosmos is also to peer back in time. Scientists are observing the tiny galaxy, which they labeled Tayna, as it existed 13.8 billion years ago. and the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes were capable of imaging it in the earliest stages of its evolution. The early cosmos was possibly populated by many such newborn galaxies, NASA officials said, but few have been seen before now as of their extreme faintness.
The scientists discovered the galaxy along with 21 other young galaxies near the outer edge of the observable universe.
"Thanks to this discovery, the team has been capable of studying for the first time the properties of exceptionally faint objects formed not long after the Big Bang," lead author Leopoldo Infante, an astrophysicist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, said in a statement.
The team called ancient newborn galaxy Tayna, which means "first-born" in the South American language Aymara spoken near Chile — it dates back to just 400 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy is approximately the size of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a prominent star-forming dwarf galaxy circling the Milky Way, but it is forming new stars around 10 times faster.
The super-faint galaxy was observable to the researchers' telescopes because of its lucky location: behind a massive galaxy cluster Hubble was studying, whose bulk bent the far-away galaxy's light as it passed by. That bending operated like a magnifying glass, focusing the galaxy's light to seem 20 times brighter than it would have otherwise.
To verify the galaxy's distance and age — it is possibly the faintest ever discovered from that early in the universe's existence, the scientists said — the scientists combined Hubble and Spitzer pictures to determine its exact color on the infrared spectrum. Galaxies seen from the early days of the universe look much redder, as of the speed they're moving away from us. However, Tayna's light was originally blue or white, its vast age means that it's moving away quickly enough to take on an infrared hue.
Astrophysicists caught this galaxy with the help of a naturally formed lens, but more powerful human-made lenses could expose galaxies of a similar age without the lucky positioning. The new James Webb Space Telescope now under construction, for example, will perhaps reveal many more of these faint galaxies near the dawn of the universe, NASA officials said in the statement.
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