Scientists have discovered the most distant galaxy ever confirmed, whose light took more than 13 billion years to reach Earth, providing a snapshot of the early universe. The faraway system resides in the night sky just above the handle of the Big Dipper.
One curious trait about the record breaker is that it forms stars at an incredible rate, about 330 per year — more than a hundred times faster than our Milky Way galaxy. This could be a trademark of the universe's early days, when hydrogen gas for star formation was much more plentiful.
"We wanted to figure out how galaxies evolve," said lead author Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at the University of Texas, Austin. "One way to do that is to push back deeper and deeper into the history of the universe."