Most distant galaxy found

The powerful Subaru telescope has recently discovered the most distant galaxy ever seen by the human race. The galaxy, which has been named IOK-1, is a colossal 12.8 billion light-years away, and appears as no more than a faint red smudge on the telescope's camera - as seen in the image below.

Subaru telescope image of the most distant galaxy known © Subaru

This means that we are seeing the galaxy as it was 12,800,000,000 years ago, just 780 million years after the Big Bang - an event thought by astronomers to have been the birth of the Universe. If you would like to find out a bit more about the Cosmology of the early Universe then click on the following link, but be warned that some of the ideas can be a bit confusing, so please don't worry too much if you have trouble understanding them at first.

Note that the image only contains a handful of stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Most of the bright objects on the image are actually distant galaxies, each containing millions of their own stars. When you realise that it would take more than 160,000 of these images to cover the whole sky, you start to realise just how vast the Universe is, and how many millions of galaxies exist within it.