Researchers dream of developing such powerful space telescopes to rewind time 13.8 billion years ago and see the moment of birth of everything - the Big Bang! Our opportunities are still limited, but new successes are noticed every year.
For example, in 2016, we managed to find a galaxy GN- z11, which is considered to be the oldest and most distant galaxy in the Universe found. It may be shocking, but its spectral redshift is z = 11.09, which indicates an accompanying distance (a measure of distance in physical cosmology) of 32 billion light years (the whole thing is in the expansion of the Universe).
How to find GN-Z11:
The galaxy was found by the Hubble Space Telescope team, which used Wide-angle camera 3, after which they conducted additional research with the Spitzer infrared space telescope. The galaxy is located in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. If we talk about size, it is inferior to the Milky Way by 20 times and 100 times less in stellar mass. However, if you follow the speed of its star formation, it is 20 times faster than the current Milky Way indicator (GN-z11 stars are 40 million years old). And now age! Analysis shows that the galactic light traveled to us 13.4 billion years, which means that the galaxy itself appeared only 400 million years after the appearance of the Universe! It can be said that GN-z11 originated closer to the end of the “dark ages” of outer space and at the beginning of the reionization era.
Now scientists are awaiting the launch of the James Webb space telescope (scheduled for 2021) in order to take a closer look at GN-z11 and find other galaxies that appeared earlier and are much further away.
