Astronomers have spied the faintest object ever seen in the early Universe.

Leopoldo Infante at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago and his team used NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to study distant objects. They examined sections of the sky through a dense cluster of galaxies, which bends and magnifies incoming light, and found 22 faint galaxies. The oldest one was observed as it was 13.4 billion years ago, around 400 million years after the Big Bang.

The small, dim galaxy was named Tayna, meaning 'firstborn' in the Native South American language Aymara. It may be more representative of the first galaxies than other distant, brighter examples, say the authors.

Astrophys. J. 815, 18 (2015)