The researchers said Wednesday it is the most ancient and distant galaxy ever seen — a small proto galaxy some 13.2 billion light-years away.

The dim object, found in images taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, was formed when the universe was just 480 million years old, the researchers said in the journal Nature.

“We’ve gone back through 96 percent of the life of the universe, to when the universe was only 4 percent of its current age, through 500 million years after the Big Bang,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, one of the researchers working on the study.

“The team searched through these wonderful data looking for galaxies at these extremely early times,” he added, “we’re peering into an era where big changes are afoot.”

Light travels at a speed of 300,000 kilometers a second in vacuum, or about 10 trillion kilometers a year. Astronomers use light-year to measure the distances of celestial bodies, and seeing light emitted from objects far away also indicates they were ancient.

The newly discovered galaxy, 13.2 billion light-year away, means the galaxy’s light started to travel 13.2 billion years ago.

Hubble, which was launched in 1990 and orbits outside the Earth’s atmosphere, has played a key role in the research in capturing faint light from the early ages of the universe. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-01/27/c_13709523.htm