Galaxy Forfeits Its Standing as Most Faraway Object in the Universe

Astronomers have stripped the “Sharon” galaxy of its title as the “most distant object” in space after recalculating its position in the universe.

Sharon, it turns out, is “only” 10 billion light years away. That’s far, but hardly the dawn of creation.

Last year, scientists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook used the Hubble Space Telescope to spot the very faint galaxy near the Big Dipper. It was officially labeled STIS 123627+621755 and determined to be 12.5 billion light years away.

Informally, they nicknamed the galaxy after the sister of a co-discoverer.

The designation prompted other scientists to take a closer look using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Daniel Stern of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the galaxy’s most recent “red shift” measurement did not support the conclusion by the Stony Brook team. The finding was published in the Nov. 30 issue of Nature.

“It’s hard for scientists to interpret faint observations of distant galaxies, and occasional misidentifications will occur,” Stern said.

Red shift, the standard distance measurement used by astronomers, measures how fast an object is moving away from us as the universe expands. The faster the object, such as a galaxy, moves away from us, the more its light shifts to the red end of the spectrum where wavelengths of light are longer.

The designation as the most distant object is more than a scientific curiosity.

The more deeply astronomers look into space, the further back in time they are looking. It takes so long for light traveling through space to reach Earth that astronomers scanning the edges of the universe are seeing distant objects as they were billions of years ago.

At 12.5 billion light years, astronomers thought that they were seeing “Sharon” as it existed 600 million years after the Big Bang, the colossal explosion believed to have created the universe.

Under the new JPL calculations, Sharon appears as it did 3.3 billion years after the Big Bang. That’s about 25% of the current age of the universe.

With Sharon’s distance discredited, what is the new titleholder for most distant object in the universe?

A quasar identified by astronomers in September 2000.