In what clearly is a record-breaking discovery, the October 20 edition of the journal Nature features a report that scientists have found the most distant space object observed thus far - a galaxy that came into existence just 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The galaxy – dubbed UDFy-38135539 – was first spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope, through its May 2009-installed camera that permitted clearer images of distant objects. In October 2009, scientists started analyzing images of a far-off portion of the sky, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

According to the report by the astronomers at the Lehnert of the Observatoire de Paris in France, follow-up spectroscopic observations identified that the UDFy-38135539 galaxy, on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, was the most distant astronomical object ever observed. It is located over 4 billion parsecs from Earth, at a redshift z = 8.

Scientists are of the opinion that the discovery of the UDFy-38135539 galaxy may help in the exploration of a crucial period in the early history of the universe - a time when light emitted by the earliest stars broke up the fog of hydrogen gas that covered the universe soon after the Big Bang. As per the scientists, that process created the “reionized” universe of the present day.

About the UDFy-38135539 galaxy, the study’s lead author astronomer Matthew Lehnert, of the Observatoire de Paris, said that its discovery sheds light on “one of the most fundamental problems in astronomy — how the universe ionized.”