By Ron Cowen
By pushing the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope to its very limits as a cosmic time machine, astronomers have identified three galaxies that may hail from an era only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The faint galaxies may be the most distant starlit bodies known, each lying some 13.2 billion light-years from Earth.
![Some of the faintest and reddest objects in this Hubble Space Telescope image, taken in August 2009, may date from only about a half billion years after the Big Bang. The near-infrared image, of a region called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, was taken with Hubble’s new Wide Field Camera 3. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, R. Bouwens and the HUDF09 Team](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/11712.jpg?resize=300%2C260&ssl=1)
Detecting galaxies at such a distance is at the very edge of what current technology can accomplish, comments Richard Ellis of Caltech, who was not part of the new study. It’s uncharted territory, he says.
If the researchers are correct in the preliminary determination, then Hubble is seeing light that reveals the galaxies as they first appeared just 480 million years after the birth of the universe. (That light traveled for billions of years to reach Earth.) The radiation from such early galaxies played a crucial role, theorists believe, in reionizing the universe. That process breaks apart neutral atoms into electrons and ions, which enabled light from the first generation of stars to stream freely into space.