Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have detected light from the most distant object yet found — a fledgling galaxy that existed when the Universe was just over 420 million years old. The discovery shows that stars were organizing into galaxies when the Universe was just 3% of its current age of 13.7 billion years. Dan Coe of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues spotted light from the galaxy by taking advantage of an intervening lens of dark matter that magnified the object. Coe says that this and other discoveries suggest that light from galaxies might be responsible for ionizing the early Universe.

Astrophys J. 762, 32 (2013)