Researchers may have discovered the most distant and oldest galaxy ever found. They have named it as EGS8p7. As per researchers, the galaxy could be more than 13.2 billion years old; it’s not much younger than our universe, which is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old.

In the beginning, a group of astronomers at the California Institute of Technology detected the galaxy as a point of additional exploration. They observed EGS8p7 in data gathered by NASA’s the Spitzer Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope. The findings of the team appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters in August.

According to a statement from the university, the group was searching for the most primitive objects in the universe for many years.

Astronomers made use of a redshift measurement in order to find out distance to galaxies. EGS8p7's redshift was found to be 8.68. Prior to that, the most distant detected galaxy was having a redshift of 7.73.

It appears that the recently identified galaxy is extraordinarily bright, opposing the idea that the early universe was tremendously dark as a result of an abundance of neutral hydrogen, according to Tech Times. According to astronomers, darkness remained for approximately a billion years.

According to Richard Ellis, a professor of astrophysics at University College London who retired from Cal Tech recently, “The surprising aspect about the present discovery is that we have detected this Lyman-alpha line in an apparently faint galaxy at a redshift of 8.68, corresponding to a time when the universe should be full of absorbing hydrogen clouds”.