Discovery of the most distant known object hints at empty early Universe.
Astronomers have glimpsed the most distant galaxy ever detected — a lone object 13.2 billion light years from Earth. The discovery implies that the fledgling Universe was emptier than was previously imagined.
The galaxy was spotted in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, an infrared image of the night sky that contains the faintest and farthest objects so far pictured. The finding "pushes the data to the very limits", says Rychard Bouwens, an astronomer now at Leiden University in the Netherlands and a co-author of the study, which is published today in Nature.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/1101...s.2011.47.html
Note: Published online 26 January 2011