Old, Old Galaxy

On January 26 NASA announced that Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the oldest galaxy yet found. UDFj-39546284 was found by the Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed during the 2009 servicing mission. The galaxy has a redshift of 10.3, making it 13.2 billion years old. It must have been formed just 500 million years after the Big Bang, making it the oldest galaxy yet discovered. This is subject of a paper in the January 26 issue of NATURE.

Old theories of galaxy formation can not explain this discovery. Every galaxy ever discovered contains at its centre a supermassive Black Hole. These Black Holes could be primordial, formed shortly after the Big Bang. Size of a primordial Black Hole is limited by a "horizon distance" related to the speed of light. Discovery of galaxies formed soon after the Big Bang is one more sign that the speed of light was once much faster.