Composite image of the galaxy cluster which helped reveal the newly discovered galaxy – MACS0647-JD. The inset at left shows a close up of the young dwarf galaxy. (NASA)

Scientists have discovered what could be the oldest, most distant galaxy in the universe, thanks to a unique combination of man-made and natural telescopes.

The newly discovered galaxy, MACS0647-JD, was found by the Cluster Lensing And Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH).

It is about 13.3 billion light years, or 125,825,000,000,000,000,000,000 km, from Earth. Scientists are getting to see it just as it was 420 million years after the Big Bang, or when the universe was only three percent of its current age of about 13.7 billion years.

Astronomers made the discovery by combining the power of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and a natural zoom effect called gravitational lensing, which uses enormous galaxy clusters as interstellar telescopes to magnify distant galaxies behind them.

The effect is achieved when the light rays from the distant object are bent by the gravity of the huge galaxy clusters, just like a giant cosmic lens, that lie between the object and  Earth.

“While one occasionally expects to find an extremely distant galaxy using the tremendous power of gravitational lensing, this latest discovery has outstripped even my expectations of what would be possible with the CLASH program,” said Rychard Bouwens of Leiden University in the Netherlands, a co-author of the study that outlined the discovery. “The science output in this regard has been incredible.”

The massive galaxy cluster that’s making the distant galaxy appear brighter than it normally would, providing the natural boost to the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, , is called MACS J0647.7+7015 and is about five billion light years away.

Hubble in orbit above the Earth (Photo: NASA)

Because of the gravitational lensing provided by the cluster, the CLASH team was able to observe three magnified images of MACS0647-JD with the Hubble.

“This cluster does what no man-made telescope can do,” said Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute, who leads the CLASH team. “Without the magnification, it would require a Herculean effort to observe this galaxy.”

The astronomers say that the distant galaxy is so small, about 600 light years across according to their observations that it may be going through its first stages formation. Our own Milky Way galaxy is about 150,000 light years across.

“This object may be one of many building blocks of a galaxy,” says Dan Coe from the Space Telescope Institute and lead author of the study.  “Over the next 13 billion years, it may have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of merging events with other galaxies and galaxy fragments.”

The galaxy could turn out to be too far away for astronomers to confirm its distance with any of the current available technology.  But once the new James Webb Space Telescope launches in 2018, astronomers expect to be able to take a definitive measurement of its distance and to study the properties of the galaxy in more detail.

MACS0647-JD, is very young and only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way. The object is observed 420 million years after the big bang.   (Video: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI))

Artist’s conception of black hole in globular cluster. (Image: Benjamin de Bivort; Strader, et al.; NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Astronomers recently made a surprising find while searching for a unique black hole in a tight cluster of stars 10,000 light years away from Earth.Instead of finding one black hole,  scientists with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) found two – twins – something that surprised them because, according to modern theory, there should only be one black hole in a cluster.

The discovery could make scientists reconsider their current understanding of the environment in globular star clusters.

The astronomers made the find while observing Messier 22 (M22), a globular star cluster containing hundreds of thousands of stars, with the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope located in New Mexico.  They were  searching for proof of a rare black hole known as an intermediate-mass black hole.

Unlike the supermassive black holes  found at the center of galaxies,  an intermediate-mass black hole has 10- to several tens of times more mass than the Sun, but is comparatively smaller in size.

“We didn’t find what we were looking for, but instead found something very surprising – two smaller black holes,” said Laura Chomiuk of Michigan State University and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

The globular cluster Messier 22 (M22) has been found to contain two black holes. (Image: Hunter Wilson)

Black holes are concentrations of mass  so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape them.  The NRAO astronomers think most black holes found within the globular cluster were  likely produced early in the cluster’s 12-billion-year history after massive stars exploded as supernovae.

Past scientific simulations suggest black holes fall toward the center of the cluster, beginning a violent gravitational competition with each other.  In the end,  only a single black hole remains in the cluster.

“There is supposed to be only one survivor possible,” said Jay Strader of Michigan State University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “Finding two black holes, instead of one in this globular cluster, definitely changes the picture.”One possible explanation is that the black holes may still be working to enlarge the center of the star cluster, reducing its density and slowing down the rate at which the black holes eject each other as they compete to become the cluster’s lone entity.

On the other hand, the astronomers think the reduction of the black hole’s density and ejection rate could also be due to the fact that the star cluster is not as far along in its process of contracting as previously thought.

The Very Large Array, a collection of 27 radio antennas, located in Socorro, New Mexico a component of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons)

“Future VLA observations will help us learn about the ultimate fate of black holes in globular clusters,” Chomiuk said.

A paper on this finding was just published in the journal “Nature”

According the NARO, these twin black holes are also the first stellar-mass black holes to be found in any globular cluster in our Milky Way Galaxy. A stellar-mass black hole is formed by the collapse of a star that has a mass that is generally 10 to 24 times that of the Sun, as compared to the giant “supermassive” black holes, which are millions, if not billions, of times as massive as the Sun.

Astronomers believe supermassive black holes lie at the center of virtually all large galaxies, including ours.