A highly magnified candidate for a young galaxy seen when the Universe was 500 Myrs old

Understand

The early Universe at redshift z\sim6-11 marks the reionization of the intergalactic medium, following the formation of the first generation of stars.

• However, those young galaxies at a cosmic age of \lesssim 500 million years (Myr, at z \gtrsim 10) remain largely unexplored as they are at or beyond the sensitivity limits of current large telescopes.
• Gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters enables the detection of high-redshift galaxies that are fainter than what otherwise could be found in the deepest images of the sky.
• We report the discovery of an object found in the multi-band observations of the cluster MACS1149+22 that has a high probability of being a gravitationally magnified object from the early universe.