Spectacular images of the far-off galaxy were spied through the Hubble space telescope and confirmed by the Keck observatory in Hawaii.

The scientists revealed their findings during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that runs here until Monday.

It took 13 billion light-years for light from the galaxy to reach the earth, light that was first emitted from the galaxy when the universe was just 750 million years old, according to the scientists.

"The galaxy we have discovered is extremely faint, and verifying its distance has been an extraordinary challenging adventure," explained astronomer Jean-Paul Kneib, of the California Institute of Technology and the Midi-Pyrenees observatory in France, the principal investigator who helped confirmed the sighting.

The location of the galaxy was plotted through a long exposure of the Abell 2218 cluster taken with the Hubble space telescope, and confirmed with telescopses based at the Keck laboratory.

The galaxy was spotted with the help of so-called "gravitational lensing," which is based on Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

Gravitational lensing works on the basis that light can be bent in predictable ways, this helps scientists to identify and locate far away objects and galaxies.

"Our study has only been possible by pushing our current observatories to the limits of their capabilities," Kneib said.

"As we were searching for distant galaxies magnified by Abell 2218, we detected a pair of strikingly similar images whose arrangement and color indicated a very distant object," Kneib explained.

"The existence of two images of the same object indicated that the phenomenon of gravitational lensing was at work."

According to the study:"An intriguing property of the new galaxy is the apparent lack of the typically bright hydrogen emission seen in many distant objects, and an intense ultraviolet signal."

The discovery was the latest in a series of achievements by the Hubble telescope since it was launched in 1990.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration however announced last month it was canceling the telescope's next servicing mission, scheduled for 2006, effectively abandoning Hubble to an early demise.

The telescope will remain in orbit as long as it can fulfill its duties, then be brought crashing back into Earth's atmosphere. While a service mission would have allowed the Hubble to keep going beyond 2010, it could now stop working as early as 2007.

SPACE.WIRE