The Hubble Space Telescope has spent just over 25 years in orbit. It remains a unique window that has let us study and marvel at the universe in incredible ways, and despite its age and newer technological advances, it still has plenty to offer. Last Thursday, it shattered the cosmic distance record by observing GN-z11, a galaxy whose light is 13.4 billion years old, the most distant ever seen.
A Cosmic Distance Record
NASA has serious plans for space exploration (starting with the visit to Mars), but it is also developing other critical projects, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which if all goes well will replace the beloved Hubble in 2018. The questionable mentality of the politicians in charge has put the James Webb project at risk in various ways, so experts around the globe will have to keep waiting and working with what we already have. Hubble carries a quarter century on its shoulders, but it still has several tricks up its sleeve, and in recent days, it managed to observe the most distant galaxy recorded to date: GN-z11.
A Glimpse of the Early Universe
As we can see in the video, GN-z11 is a very faint red spot in a chilling galactic field, but that speck of light gives us an indication of what that galaxy looked like 13.4 billion years ago. According to available information, that makes GN-z11 a true universal great-grandmother, separated from the Big Bang by "only" 400 million years. The complex process required the use of the Wide Field Camera 3 installed during the last shuttle mission to the telescope (in May 2009), and it pushed Hubble to its extreme limit of observation, though the new mark far exceeds the performance of other ground-based telescopes.
What's Next for Deep-Space Observation
Three additional details about GN-z11 indicate that it contains only 1 percent of the Milky Way's mass in stars, and is about 25 times smaller, yet it is forming stars at a rate 20 times faster than our galaxy does today. It is likely that GN-z11 represents the "ceiling" of the Hubble Space Telescope, but with James Webb less than two years away, and the WFIRST telescope in 2025, we will surely see even more distant galaxies.
