A very small, faint galaxy -- possibly one of the long sought "building blocks" of present-day galaxies -- has been discovered by a collaboration between two telescopes and their crews of astronomers.NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the 10-meter Keck Telescopes spotted the galaxy at a tremendous distance of 13.4 billion light-years (based on the estimate of 14 billion years as the age of the universe).
This has profound implications for our understanding of how and when the first stars and galaxies formed in the universe.
The discovery was made possible by examining small areas of the sky viewed through massive intervening clusters of galaxies. These act as a powerful gravitational lens, magnifying distant objects and allowing scientists to probe how galaxies assemble at very early times.
Members of the team of scientists include: Jean-Paul Kneib (Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees, France), Richard Ellis, Mike Santos (both Caltech) and Konrad Kuijken (Kapteyn Institute, the Netherlands). The team's research paper will appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Richard Ellis (Caltech, USA) and Jean-Paul Kneib (Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees, France)
Images associated with this story are available at this URL and this one and via links in these three URLs: http://hubble.stsci.edu/go/news, http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/latest.html and http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html.
(Editor's Note: Information for this story was provided jointly by NASA, ESA, Caltech/the W.M. Keck Observatory and NOVA, the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy.)
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA), for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The W.M. Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA.
Acknowledgment: The original images of Abell 2218 were obtained by A. Fruchter and the ERO Team (STScI, ST-ECF) as part of the Hubble Servicing Mission 3A Early Release Observations.
[Contact: Richard Ellis, Jean-Paul Kneib, Konrad Kuijken]
08-Oct-2001
