The Hubble space telescope has captured a picture of the farthest galaxy ever seen, named GN-z11, around 13.4 billion light years away from earth. The observation is expected to shed fresh light on the nature of the early universe.

The latest measurement, carried out by a team comprising scientists from Yale University, the Space Telescope Science Institute and the University of California, has broken the record set in 2012 when the telescope captured a dwarf galaxy that was 13.3 billion years old.

The NASA and the European Space Agency released the photo throwback on Thursday, which is a red dot above the big dipper. The spot is believed to have formed just 400 million years after the Big Bang, a moment that is learnt to have started the universe.

Pascal Oesch from the Yale University said in a statement, “We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We managed to look back in time to measure the distance to a galaxy when the universe was only 3 per cent of its current age”.

NASA release said the GN-z11 galaxy is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way, but has been growing at a rapid pace, forming stars at a 20 times greater speed than our galaxy does at present.

Despite appearing only as a faint smudge to our eyes, the new galaxy is in reality considered to be quite bright in view of the fact that it is so far away. It produces around 24 stars in a year.

Pushing the Hubble Space Telescope to its limit, astronomers took the GN-z11’s picture by using its Wide Field Camera 3 to find the galaxy’s distance from us.

Pascal added that the Hubble observation is a major step back in time, beyond what anyone could have ever expected to be done with the telescope.