Astronomers picked up the signal of a distant hydrogen glob glowing five billion light years from Earth with doubling the previous record. When molecules are excited they absorb and emit signature frequencies that allow astronomers to recognise different gases of million light years away.

“Due to the upgrade of the Very Large Array, this is the first time we’ve been able to directly measure atomic hydrogen in a galaxy this far from Earth. These signals would have begun their journey before our planet even existed, and after five billion years of travelling through space without hitting anything, they’ve fallen into the telescope and allowed us to see this distant galaxy for the very first time,” Ximena Fernández, an astronomer at Rutgers University, said in a news release.

Hydrogen is ubiquitous in the universe which reveals its presence about a galaxy. The main fuel for star creation is hydrogen. Peering deeper into space is looking back in time where astronomers study the evolution of galactic gas concentrations.

“This is precisely the goal of the project, to study how gas in galaxies has changed through history. A question we hope to answer is whether galaxies in the past had more gas being turned into stars than galaxies today. Our record breaking find is a galaxy with an unusually large amount of hydrogen,” Fernández said.

The astrophysical journal was made possible by the power of Amazon web services.

“It’s fast becoming more about the data and how you move, store and analyse vast volumes of information. Big science needs a lot of computing power — right now we’re designing systems to manage data for several large facilities around the world and the next generation of radio telescopes, including China’s 500m radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array and the SKA’s pathfinder telescopes that are already up and running in outback Western Australia,” explained Andreas Wicenec, head of the Data-Intensive Astronomy team at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research.