May 5, 2015

Astronomers set a new distance record for galaxies




(May 5, 2015)  An international team of astronomers led by UC Santa Cruz and Yale University has pushed back the cosmic frontier of galaxy exploration to a time when the universe was only 5 percent of its present age. The team discovered an exceptionally luminous galaxy more than 13 billion light years from Earth and determined its exact distance using the powerful MOSFIRE instrument on the Keck I 10-meter telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.