Galaxy Abell 1835 IR1916 is seen as a tiny dot in this photo of distant galaxies. Image courtesy of ESO.

Abell 1835 IR1916 (also known as Abell 1835, Galaxy Abell 1835, or Galaxy Abell 1835 IR1916) is a candidate for being the most distant galaxy ever observed. It was discovered by French and Swiss astronomers of the European Southern Observatory, namely Roser Pelló, Johan Richard, Jean-François Le Borgne, Daniel Schaerer, and Jean-Paul Kneib. The astronomers used a near-infrared instrument on the Very Large Telescope to detect the galaxy; other observatories were then used to make an image of it possible. The Observatory, in conjunction with the Swiss National Science Foundation, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, issued a press release on 1 March 2004 announcing the discovery.

Their analysis of J-band observations indicated that the galaxy is 13.2 billion light years away from the Earth (z=10), in the Virgo constellation. This means that Abell 1835 IR1916 appears to us as it was 13.2 billion years ago, only 500 million years after the Big Bang and very close to the first burst of star formation in the universe. Its visibility at such a great distance was credited to gravitational lensing by the galaxy cluster Abell 1835 between it and us.

However, further analysis by Weatherley et al. (2004) of the data that lead to the first announcement has cast doubt on the claim that it is a distant object, and follow-up observations in the H-band using the Gemini North Telescope were not able to detect it at all (Bremer et al. 2004).

References

• "Astronomy & Astrophysics" (A&A, volume 416, page L35; "ISAAC/VLT observations of a lensed galaxy at z=10.0" by Roser Pelló, Daniel Schaerer, Johan Richard, Jean-François Le Borgne, and Jean-Paul Kneib)

• "Astronomy & Astrophysics" (A&A, volume 428 page L29-L32; Reanalysis of the spectrum of the z = 10 galaxy by Weatherley, S. J.; Warren, S. J.; Babbedge, T. S. R.

• "The Astrophysical Journal" (ApJ, Volume 615, Issue 1, pp. L1-L4; Gemini H-Band Imaging of the Field of a z = 10 Candidate by Bremer, M. N.; Jensen, Joseph B.; Lehnert, M. D.; Schreiber, N. M. Förster; Douglas, Laura)