GN-z11
GN-z11 is a galaxy in the constellation Great Bear .
It is 13.4 billion years old and only 4 percent the size of the Milky Way . GN-z11 was formed 400 million years after the Big Bang and has a spectroscopic redshift of z = 11.1. The number of stars in GN-z11 is only about 1% that of the Milky Way, but the star production and thus the growth is 20 times as high.
Its discovery was announced in March 2016 and has since been considered the oldest known galaxy and the most distant known object in the universe . GN-z11 was discovered on the basis of observations from 2014 by the US astronomers Pascal Oesch, Gabriel Brammer and Garth Illingworth, which data from the Hubble space telescope (Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) and Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) North Surveys).
The distance to Earth is about 32 billion light years or 9.8 gigaparsecs. So it is many times greater than the light travel distance of 13.4 billion light years. This is not a contradiction to the special theory of relativity, as is often believed, since the expansion of the universe adds to the light travel distance. The distance to the observation horizon within which objects can still be perceived is 46.6 billion light years according to the Big Bang standard model.
Web links
- ESA: Hubble Telescope - Hubble breaks cosmic distance record (English, March 3, 2016)
- Hubble ESA - Zoom on GN-z11 ( YouTube video, March 2, 2016)
Individual evidence
- ↑ 13.4 billion light years: "Hubble" telescope sees the most distant galaxy. In: SPIEGEL ONLINE. Retrieved March 4, 2016 .
- ↑ heise online: New record: Hubble discovers the most distant galaxy to date. In: heise online. Retrieved March 4, 2016 .