An international team of astronomers report that they have looked back, almost to the Big Bang itself and found the oldest known galaxy to date. At 13.1 billion years old, the galaxy EGS-zs8-1 was formed when the universe was only about 500 million years old.

The researchers report that the galaxy was first identified based on its colors in images from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. Coming from a time when the universe was younger and hotter, it is one of the most massive objects detected in the early universe.

Its age and distance from the Earth were determined using the Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration (MOSFIRE) instrument on the 10-meter telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

While the light from the Sun takes just 8 minutes to reach the Earth, the light from EGS-zs8-1 has been travelling through space for 13.1 billion years. The galaxy itself does not exist anymore in the form that scientists are seeing it now.

“It has already built more than 15% of the mass of our own Milky Way today. But it had only 670 million years to do so. The universe was still very young then,” said Pascal Oesch, in a statement.

Oesch is an astronomer at Yale and lead author of a study published online May 5 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The distance measurement allowed the astronomers to determine that at the time, 13.1 billion years ago, it was still forming stars 80 times faster than the Milky Way does today.

Only a handful of galaxies have been measured in the very early universe and EGS-zs8-1 is the oldest to date.

“Every confirmation adds another piece to the puzzle of how the first generations of galaxies formed in the early universe. Only the largest telescopes are powerful enough to reach to these large distances,” said Pieter van Dokkum, chair of Yale’s Department of Astronomy, who is second author of the study.

The universe was undergoing dramatic changes 13.1 billion years ago. For the first 380,000 years after the big bang, the universe was too hot for light to shine. After that, during the era of recombination, things had cooled enough for for atoms to begin to form, resulting in transparent electrically neutral gas. It was at this point that the initial flash of the big bang was unleashed, then things went dark again.

About 400 million years after the Big Bang the epoch of reionization began. For the the next half-billion years the first stars and galaxies began to form and most of the neutral hydrogen moved from a neutral to an ionized state.

“It appears that the young stars in the early galaxies like EGS-zs8-1 were the main drivers for this transition, called reionization,” said Rychard Bouwens of the Leiden Observatory, co-author of the study.

Interestingly, recent evidence suggests that water appeared in the universe much earlier than previously thought.

“We looked at the chemistry within young molecular clouds containing a thousand times less oxygen than our Sun. To our surprise, we found we can get as much water vapor as we see in our own galaxy,” said astrophysicist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

However, it is almost unimaginable that anything we would recognize as life could have existed inEGS-zs8-1. At that time, even if the right ingredients could come together, the universe, was simply too hot and too volatile.

The observations confirm that massive galaxies existed at that point in the early universe and astronomers now have evidence that the colors of these galaxies, observed in the Spitzer images, come from a rapid formation of massive young stars.

The discovery also makes the researchers more anxious for the launch of Hubbel’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2018. In addition to being able to look even further back in time, the JWST will allow for better observations of galaxies like EGS-zs8-1.

“Our current observations indicate that it will be very easy to measure accurate distances to these distant galaxies in the future with the James Webb Space Telescope. The result of JWST’s upcoming measurements will provide a much more complete picture of the formation of galaxies at the cosmic dawn,” said co-author Garth Illingworth of the University of California-Santa Cruz.

Research into the events and composition of the early universe should also be aided by the research from the recent restart of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

According to Space.com, “it turns out that atoms only make up 4.6 percent of the universe. Of the remainder, 23 percent is made up of dark matter, which is likely composed of one or more species of subatomic particles that interact very weakly with ordinary matter, and 72 percent is made of dark energy, which apparently is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.”

Dark matter is one of the things that scientists at CERN hope to learn more about during the LHC’s second run.