Researchers have discovered that soon after the Big Bang, some of the first galaxies may have been in a rush to make stars.
That’s at least the case for A1689-zD1, an ancient galaxy that’s an incredibly long way from Earth – so far away that we are seeing it from when the Universe was a mere 700 million years old.
You’re probably familiar with the concept of light-years. Some stars and other celestial bodies are so far away from Earth that it even takes their light millions, if not billions of Earth years to reach our planet. That’s why some of the stars we see in the sky may have long since disappeared, and what we are seeing is actually more like a recap of the Universe’s history.
That’s the case for the light from A1689- zD1, which is only reaching us now with the help of the gravitational magnification from a spectacularly dense and massive (and far younger) galaxy cluster known as Abell 1689.
Light from A1689- zD1 was first noticed by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope some time ago.
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