The farthest galaxy ever discovered the galaxy that's going to appear in your view any second now this galaxy is extremely far away this is literally as far as we can actually see physically at least for now because we don't have a better telescope and this is the galaxy we're talking about today known as gn z11.
gn refers to its location in what's known as the goods north field of galaxy and this is actually what all of it looks like where z11 stands for the redshift of this galaxy and recent studies have tried to estimate how far away it actually is by trying to recalculate the value for this redshift but also try to discover anything else unusual about this galaxy and they have discovered something strange about it but before we talk about this why is it weird to begin with and also what does the z11 redshift mean well as you probably know when it comes to cosmological distances we don't necessarily measure things in kilometers or even in light years at really far away distances this becomes almost impossible but we can measure distances in what's known as redshift the natural shifting of all of the light as it travels across the universe becoming slightly less energetic with time we think it's because of the mysterious dark energy but at this point we are not really going to talk about this because we don't really know why we just know that it's something that happens naturally so in this case if we were to actually take a look at a really really far away galaxy or in this case many different galaxies some of them would actually appear more red than others and this becomes even more pronounced as we start looking deeper and deeper into the universe here for example you can see how red-shifted this particular galaxy is now naturally by using this red shift and also by using the calculations of hubble constant we can then start establishing various distances across space or we can also just use a calculator like this one right here created by netwrite from ucla and the formula for redshift is pretty simple if you know what the light is supposed to be in terms of wavelength and you then compare it to the observed wavelength you can determine the value of z so let's just say you look at the galaxy and you determine that the value is z equals one at z equals one the distance to this particular galaxy is roughly around 11 billion light years away from us okay well that's awesome but how about this galaxy the redshift here is 11. how far away would this be from us currently and the value you get is about 32.1 billion light-years that's right it's about 32 billion light-years away from us now obviously some of you might be asking but the universe is only 13 billion years old don't forget the universe has been expanding so because of the expansion of the universe the galaxy was also moving away from us as the universe was expanding and so this distance is much larger now but here we also see that the light traveled for 13.3 billion years meaning that this galaxy is about 400 million years old
at least in this particular picture and this is very interesting because this is the time when we believe the universe itself was still opaque it wasn't actually that transparent just yet in other words it was after what's known as the cosmic dark ages when the universe was filled with this neutral hydrogen gas that wasn't actually letting through any of the light it was literally just foggy everywhere in the universe and it was really because of these first stars that formed in the first few hundreds of millions of years of the existence of the universe that we actually started to experience this period known as the reionization this is essentially when the universe finally became transparent and started to let through all of the light we're not entirely sure if it was really the stars or the galaxies or a combination of both that kind of caused all of this but we know that before this it was really difficult to see anything and it just so happens that as you can see from this particular image the galaxy that we've discovered this galaxy known as gnz11 appeared right at the start of the reionization period it's essentially possibly the only galaxy we'll ever see because everything else was still invisible it was still opaque in other words the universe itself was not actually letting through any of the light but it let through this particular light from this particular galaxy and since the original discovery we were able to learn quite a lot of really cool things about it now first of all this is what we think it may have looked like back then it was essentially an extremely bright very sort of a star bursty galaxy with a lot of formation of various stars but it was also much smaller than the milky way about 25 times smaller it also contained maybe about one percent of the total mass of the milky way but was obviously forming stars much faster maybe about 20 times as fast as the milky way right now but also don't forget that this galaxy is extremely young it's only about 40 million years old here and that means that these stars are basically just brand new stars that just appeared and started to form the galaxy as we see it and a lot of the light that they're emitting here is actually ultraviolet light which is what we expect from these very powerful very new stars this is also what we see from some of the other galaxies near us but because of the tremendous redshift of 11 essentially all of this ultraviolet light becomes this very very dark red light it's essentially shifted by a tremendous amount essentially making all of the other light like such as visual light invisible to us unless we look at this with some sort of infrared telescope but one of the recent studies that you can find in the description below examine this galaxy in more detail discovering certain really unusual features that we really didn't expect here they were looking at these ultraviolet emissions from very specific chemicals trying to identify known chemicals to us and thus calculate the exact distance to this galaxy once again making the exact value this 10.957 which makes this about 420 million years old and makes it just a little bit closer than we initially thought but still really far away still the farthest galaxy out there but at the same time the same team using the same data also reported something we clearly did not expect at all they discovered what's known as a gamma ray burst an extremely rare event that we think only happens in a single galaxy maybe once every million years or so and their observation does suggest that the galaxy here became extremely bright for at least 20 seconds which they refer to as the flash but it could have been the typical gamma-ray burst that we usually attacked in various galaxies once again though this would be an extremely rare event and the fact that they discovered something like this is really absolutely mind-blowing because it's almost impossible to detect a gamma-ray burst in a single galaxy by just looking at it for a few minutes and this is what happened here now obviously there are going to be possibly other explanations such as maybe this was a satellite signal or maybe this was a terrestrial gamma-ray flash which do occur coming from planet earth as well so maybe this is what was actually seen completely by accident but in reality we're not going to know until further investigations and until further observations longer observations of this unusual and strange galaxy however if this is a gamma-ray burst or gamma-ray flash as has been suggested by the follow-up papers that came out a few days ago this can only suggest one thing that these gamma-ray flashes or gamma-ray bursts were probably a lot more frequent and a lot more common in the early universe it just means that the universe back then was extremely active and a lot of crazy things were going on everywhere and this kind of makes sense i mean black holes may have been producing a lot more of these gamma ray bursts and also naturally a lot of different powerful supernova could produce them as well but it means that we might be underestimating the number this could be extremely common to the point of being almost a daily occurrence which is something that a lot of scientists currently cannot explain or something that we can't even start to explain but nevertheless this is an exciting galaxy and it's definitely worth studying it a lot more and what's really cool about it something that i forgot to mention is that it's also located in a very well-known constellation known as the big dipper also known as ursa major it's going to be extremely difficult for you to locate this object because it's basically in the middle of dark space but next time you look at the big dipper which is basically right here and with the ursa major being the rest of the constellation the galaxy itself is right in this location .