Hubble appears to have beaten the record for the oldest galaxy observed by over 120Million light years.

While there may  be some confirmation to do on the discovery , the candidate Galaxy named UDFj-39546284, is seen as it was just 480 million years after the Big Bang at a distance of 13.2 billion light years away. Current theory suggests we shouldn’t find any galaxies more than about 13.5 billion light years away. So going from 13.1 to 13.2 billion light years represents a significant step closer to that ultimate limit. The results were published online today in Nature.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Rychard Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz and Leiden University) and the HUDF09 Team.