WASHINGTON U.S. and British astronomers have pushed back the limits of space yet again, finding an infant galaxy some 12.3 billion light-years from Earth, Science News says. The sighting breaks a record set in early March when astronomers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland espied a galaxy 12.2 billion light years away which they named RD-1. The new galaxy, discovered by astronomers at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and Cambridge University in England, was formed 60 million years earlier in cosmic history, Science News says in the issue out Saturday. That difference in time may not seem like much, but a small interval may have made a substantial difference in the properties of the universe when it was very young, Science News says.

The new find signals that astronomers are on the verge of finding the very first galaxies, those that were in existence when the universe was only some 500 million years old, the magazine says. The breakthrough is attributed to the extraordinary power of the twin 10-meter (330-foot) Keck telescopes, the world's largest visible-light telescopes, mounted on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii. What we're doing now, we can only do with Keck, Richard McMahon of Cambridge University is quoted as saying.

(AFP)