Hubble could smash distance record

The Hubble Space Telescope may be about to rip up the record books.

It has picked up a mysterious object that could be much further away from Earth than anything ever seen before.

Currently, astronomers can see about 12 billion light years into the distance. But if the latest Hubble discovery is confirmed, our view of the outer reaches of the Universe will be pushed back even further.

The mysterious object cropped up in a close study of a very deep image of the distant Universe called the Hubble Deep Field North.

Current record holders

Astronomers measure the distance of celestial objects according to their redshift. Because of the expansion of the Universe, the wavelengths of the light from far-off objects are stretched towards the red end of the spectrum.

The greater the redshift, the greater the distance.

The present record holder is a galaxy with a redshift of 6.7 and a quasar with a redshift of 5.8.

Now, according to Bruce Dickinson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Hubble has found an object that may have a redshift of 12.

He describes his results in a preprint of a research paper that will be published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Other possibilities

There are several possibilities to account for the observations. The object could be a heavily obscured galaxy, a nearby but strange type of star called a carbon star, or the most distant object in the known Universe.

"It would be very strange to have found a highly obscured galaxy with colours this extreme in one very small area such as the Hubble Deep Field image," Dr Dickinson told PhysicsWeb.

Some early observations of the mysterious object made at the Kitt Peak Observatory in the US suggest that it has a redshift of 12.5. At the moment, astronomers are using the world's largest telescope, the Keck reflector in Hawaii, to get a close-up view of it.