"By Alan Boyle
The Hubble Space Telescope has outdone itself by catching sight of what may be the most distant galaxy ever seen, lying about 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. If the observations hold up, they would one-up another galaxy that made headlines last October when researchers said it was 13.1 billion light-years away.
The newfound galaxy candidate, discussed in this week's issue of the journal Nature, is known by the unwieldy name UDFj-39546284. (Let's call it UDFj for short.) Like the earlier candidate for the farthest galaxy, UDFy-38135539, it was detected amid other faint galaxies in a snapshot of the sky known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.
This particular candidate was singled out during an exhaustive search of the deep-field data in infrared wavelengths, which was gathered during 87 hours of observations by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in 2009 and 2010. Based on the characteristic shift in UDFj's light spectrum, astronomers determined that the galaxy dated back to a time just 480 million years after the big bang.
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Cosmic Log - Hubble spots farthest galaxy ... again:
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