* Astronomy

Astronomers have caught a glimpse of galaxies that existed a mere 500 million years after the Big Bang, more than 13 billion years ago.

For the past few months, researchers have been poring over the new WFC3 data set - a sliver of sky about one-twelfth the diameter of the full Moon, viewed for 173,000 seconds over four days - searching for ancient galaxies that might deepen understanding of how the Universe evolved. The current record-holder for distance is a gamma ray burst, discovered in April, with a redshift of 8.2.
Now, astronomer Garth Illingworth at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues have found tentative evidence of three galaxies with redshifts of around 10. These would have existed when the Universe was just 3-4% of its current age, and would be among the oldest objects ever seen.
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