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This beats the old record by about 30 million years, which isn’t much, but was difficult to achieve, said astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California Santa Cruz, who co-authored the paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters announcing the discovery.
The photo they took was from a crucial time in the early universe, after what was called t
he Dark Ages, when galaxies and stars were just starting to form and the universe was only one five hundredth the mass it is now, Illingworth said.
This galaxy – larger than most of the others from that time, which is why astronomers using the most powerful telescopes can see it – was probably only about 100 million years also, but was quite busy, Illingworth said.
logical model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution.[1][2][3] It states that the universe was in a very high density state and then expanded.[4][5] If the known laws of physics are extrapolated beyond where they are valid there is a singularity. Modern measurements place this moment at approximately 13.8 billionyears ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe.[6] After the initial expansion, the universe cooled sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles, and later simple atoms. Giant clouds of these primordial elements later coalesced through gravity to form stars and galaxies.
In the mid-20th century, three British astrophysicists, Stephen Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penroseturned their attention to the Theory of Relativity and its implications regarding our notions of time. In 1968 and 1970, they published papers in which they extended Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to include measurements of time and space.[7][8] According to their calculations, time and space had a finite beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy.