NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope broke previous cosmic distance record when it zoomed into the most distant galaxy in the deepest reaches of the space. The remote galaxy is GN-z11, which existed mere 400 million years after the Big Bang. Hubble Space Telescope has been offering amazing capabilities to astronomers for the past 25 years. James Webb Telescope will offer even better resolution compared to Hubble.

The most distant galaxy located in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) north field is about 25 times smaller than the earth’s Milky Way galaxy. The discovery is a result of a wide-range survey, which contains about tens of thousands of galaxies, by the Hubble telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Currently, the GN-z11 galaxy is an infant, but it is growing very fast, said astronomers. The remote galaxy has been forming stars at a rate more than 20 times higher than the Milky Way, they added.

The discovery by the NASA and ESA team is scheduled to be featured in The Astrophysical Journal on March 8.

The surprisingly bright galaxy is so far that the team had to push the Hubble’s boundaries to observe it. In the sky from earth, it is present in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major the Greater Bear.

“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age”, said Pascal Oesch, an astronomer from Yale University and lead researcher of the discovery.

The team behind the findings said the observation of the most-distant-known galaxy has provided sufficient clues, indicating that there could be some unusual and unexpectedly bright galaxies in the observable universe. Earlier, the team calculated the GN-z11’s distance by knowing about its color using Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescope.