Summary on "Candidate for Most DIstant Galaxy Discovered"

I just finished reading an article called “Candidate for Most Distant Galaxy Discovered.” It was published today November 15, 2012! MACS0647-JD is the candidate for the most distant galaxy discovered. It is known to be a very young and small galaxy.MACS0647-JD size is equal to a small piece of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Wow that is small! How do these scientists know if MACS0647-JD really is a galaxy? The team that’s researching this is the Cluster Lensing And Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH). Using gravitational lensing, which is “using massive galaxy clusters as cosmic telescopes to magnify distant galaxies behind them.” this allows them to find the galaxies. Hubble’s wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) were used to observe MACS0647- JD.  They saw the galaxy was visible in the two reddest filters. ‘“So either MACS0647-JD is a very red object, only shining at red wavelengths, or it is extremely distant and its light has been ‘redshifted’ to these wavelengths, or some combination of the two,” Coe (Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute) said.  

            MACS0647-JD’s width is researched to be less than 600 light-years. That’s tiny compared to our galaxy which is 150,000 light years across.  This is impressive.  It’s interesting to know that there are other galaxies in space besides ours.  I wonder what further studies will reveal about the universe? I am going to my first Astronomy club meeting tomorrow and I can’t wait to see what we’re going to talk about.

View the article "Candidate for Most Disant Galaxy"