Is this a snap shot of the Big Bang?

This image is judged to be the furthest known object ever observed in the universe taken this week by the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii. This “smudge” is estimated to be 13 billion light years away. If that’s so then this picture captures an astronomical event which took place around the time of the “Big Bang.”

What could it be?

GRB 090423 exploded on the scene when the Universe was only 630 million years old, and its light has been travelling to us for over 13 billion years.

More photos and info from the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii

Telescope Snaps Most Distant Object

Astronomers tracking a mysterious blast of energy called a gamma ray burst said on Tuesday they had snapped a photograph of the most distant object in the universe — a smudge 13 billion light-years away.

Hawaii’s Gemini Observatory caught the image earlier this month after a satellite first detected the burst.

“Our infrared observations from Gemini immediately suggested that this was an unusually distant burst, these images were the smoking gun,” said Edo Berger of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Distortions in the light signature of the object show it is 13 billion years old — at the speed of light, 13 billion light-years away. A light-year is 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).

This makes it easily the most distant object ever seen by humanity, Berger said.

Gamma-ray bursts are luminous explosions that mostly occur when massive stars run out of fuel and begin collapsing into either a black hole or a neutron star.

“I have been chasing gamma-ray bursts for a decade, trying to find such a spectacular event,” said Berger. “We now have the first direct proof that the young universe was teeming with exploding stars and newly-born black holes only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang,” he said.