A long time ago, a galaxy far, farthest away … 13.1 billion light years away, to be exact

Astronomers have discovered a baby blue galaxy that is farther away in distance and time than any galaxy ever seen. It’s among the universe’s first generation of galaxies, from 13.1 billion years ago.

Yale and University of California Santa Cruz scientists used three different telescopes to spot and then calculate the age of the blurry infant galaxy. By measuring how the light has shifted, they determined the galaxy, called EGS-zs8-1, is from about 670 million years after the Big Bang.

Because when astronomers look farther away from Earth, they are looking back further in time, this is both the most distant galaxy and the furthest back in time. It’s 13.1 billion light-years away, in the constellation Bootes. A light-year is 9.3 trillion kilometers.

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 the 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.