Feb 1 1996
From The Space Library
Astronomers at California Institute of Technology announced the discovery of what they believed to be the most distant galaxy ever glimpsed from the Earth. The team of scientists, including Thomas A. Barlow, Limin Liu, Wallace L. W. Sargent, and Donna S. Womble, had stumbled across the unnamed galaxy while studying a quasar silhouetted by the galaxy's light. The team used the W. M. Keck Observatory atop the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. In comparison to other documented galaxies, their find was a relatively young galaxy-probably formed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxy resides near the constellation Virgo. Ironically, since the galaxy lies 14 billion light-years away from Earth, the scientists had no way of knowing whether their discovery still actually existed. The scientists hoped that their discovery would offer new understanding of the period when stars began to congregate into galaxies.
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