Astronomers just saw farther back in time than they ever have before "To look through the lens of a telescope is to peer back in time. The light we view through it has spent hundreds, millions, even billions of years crossing the vastness of space to reach us, carrying with it images of things that happened long ago. On Thursday, astronomers at the Hubble Space Telescope announced that they’d seen back farther than they ever have before, to a galaxy 13.4 billion light years away in a time when the universe was just past its infancy. The finding shattered what’s known as the “cosmic distance record,” illuminating a point in time that scientists once thought could never be seen with current technology. “We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble,” Yale University astrophysicist Pascal Oesch, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. The galaxy, unpoetically named GN-z11, appears as an unremarkable, fuzzy, dark red splotch when it’s magnified from an image taken by the Hubble Telescope. But by measuring a phenomenon known as redshift, Oesch and his colleagues were able to look back in time to when the galaxy was brilliantly blue and incredibly hot, bursting with brand new stars that formed at a frenetic rate. “It really is star bursting,” study co-author Gabriel Brammer, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, told the Associated Press. Redshift explains GN-z11’s dull crimson coloring: Because the universe is expanding, every object we see through a telescope is actually moving away from us. And as they move, the waves of light they emit stretch out, shifting in color from blue, which has a relatively short wavelength, down to red, whose waves are long. The phenomenon isn’t so different from the way the sound of a train deepens as it chugs away from the listener. By measuring the degree of redshift, scientists can figure out how long light has been traveling to us through space, and thereby how long ago the thing that they’re looking at existed. Previously, the highest redshift number assigned to a galaxy was 8.68 — meaning it existed some 13.2 billion years in the past. GN-z11’s redshift number is 11.1..." http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...n-they-ever-have-before/ar-BBqkG9A?li=BBnb7Kz