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Oldest Ever Galaxy Found
WASHINGTON(AP)-Astronomers believe they've found the oldest thing they've ever seen in the universe:
It's a galaxy (星系) far, far away from a time long, long ago.
Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small point of light that European
astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That's a time when the universe was very
young, just about 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far.
By now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn't exist in its earlier form and has already changed into
bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online
Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"We are looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age," said California Institute of
Technology astronomy professor Richard Ellis, who wasn't part of the discovery team."In human terms,
we're looking at a 4-year-old boy in the lifetime of an adult."
While Ellis finds the basis for the study "pretty good", there have been other claims about the age of distant
space objects that have not held up to careful examination. And some experts have questions about this one.
But even the doubters praised the study as important and interesting.
The European astronomers calculated the age after 16 hours of observations from a telescope in Chile that
looked at light signatures of cooling hydrogen gas.
Earlier this year, astronomers had made a general estimate of 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang
(宇宙大爆炸) for the most distant unclear points of light in the Hubble photograph, which was presented at
an astronomy meeting back in January.
In the new study, researchers focused on a single galaxy in their analysis of hydrogen's light signature,
further finding out the age. Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was the
scientist behind the Hubble image, said it provided confirmation for the age using a different method,
something he called amazing "for such faint objects".
1. We can learn from the passage that ______.
A. the universe came into being about 14 billion years ago
B. the galaxy is believed to be the same as it was just born
C. the newly-discovered galaxy is the oldest one in the universe
D. the galaxy had traveled about 600 millions before the scientists found it
2. We can infer from the fourth paragraph that ______.
A. the universe is actually very young
B. the life-time of the universe is surprisingly long
C. the humans have been so able as to see far into the universe
D. what we can see about the universe now is just the tip of the iceberg
3. What did some people doubt according to the fifth paragraph?
A. The importance of the discovery
B. The truth of the discovery
C. The actual age of the new galaxy
D. The size of the new galaxy
