Leiden astronomers found oldest light ever; 13.23b light years away

An international team of astronomers, including some scientists from Leiden, has detected the most distant and oldest galaxy so far discovered. The galaxy has been named EGS8p7, according to Alles Over Sterrenkunde, or Everything About Astronomy in English. Light from this galaxy traveled 13,23 billion years to reach the earth, which means that it already existed when the universe was only 550 million years old, thereby beating the previous record by 100 million years. When detecting distant galaxies, astronomers compare the colors of galaxies in images made with the Hubble Space Telescope with infrared observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Astronomers only figured out that they could detect galaxies at such huge distances using the ultraviolet radiation emitted by young stars a few years ago. According to the site, the results of recent computer simulations show that 500 million years after the Big Bang, the universe was already orderly enough for galaxies to come into existence, even large complex galaxies like our Milky-way.