A galaxy far, far away has shattered the cosmic distance record set by astronomers. Scientists pushed the Hubble Space Telescope to its limits to confirm that the galaxy is 13.4 billion light years away, the most distant and oldest object known in the universe. The light we see from the galaxy began its long journey through space just 400 million years after the Big Bang gave birth to the universe. Astronomers measured the distance to the galaxy, known asGN-z11, by splitting its light up into its component colours. Because of the expansion of the universe, distant objects flying away from us have their light stretched to the red end of the spectrum - a phenomenon known as "red shift". The larger an object's red shift, the further away it is. Previously a galaxy called EGSY8p7 held the red shift record, a figure of 8.68. But GN-z11has a red shift of 11.1, corresponding to just 400 million years after the universe began. Dr Pascal Oesch, a member of the team from Yale University in the US, said: "We've taken a major step back in time, beyond what we'd ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We managed to look back in time to measure the distance to a galaxy when the universe...
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