Newfound galaxy almost as old as Big Bang

There’s old, then there’s Big Bang old.

Using one of the world’s most powerful telescopes, scientists announced on Monday the discovery of a distant galaxy that’s about 12.8 billion years old. It’s “only” about 1 billion years younger than the Big Bang, making it the second-oldest celestial object discovered.

“This new object is very close to being one of the first galaxies ever to form,” said astrophysicist Min Yun of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, co-author of a study published Monday in Nature Astronomy.

There is only one other, slightly older and more distant object like this that is known, the study said.

“The Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago, and now we are seeing this galaxy from 12.8 billion years ago, so it was forming within the first billion years after the Big Bang,” Yun said.

“Seeing an object within the first billion years is remarkable because the universe was too hot and too uniform to form anything for the first 400 million years,” he said. “So our best guess is that the first stars and galaxies and black holes all formed within the first half a billion to 1 billion years.”

The galaxy, named G09 83808, was spotted with the powerful Large Millimeter Telescope in Mexico, a high-precision time machine that can see images of galaxies born billions of years ago.

The telescope, operated jointly by UMass and Mexico’s National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics, provides insight into the birth and evolution of the universe, according to UMass. Once it comes fully online in the next few months, Yun said, its higher resolution and sensitivity mean “we can find really, really faint things. They are essentially at the very edge of the universe.”