Astronaut Scholar Larry Bradley of the Johns Hopkins University led an international team of astronomers credited for discovering the most distant galaxy ever observed. The galaxy dates to 13 billion years ago, when the Universe was just 700 million years old. Bradley and his colleagues uncovered the distant galaxy by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a nearby massive cluster of galaxies. The galaxy cluster, whose mass is about a thousand times that of the Milky Way, worked as a gravitational lens magnifying the light from the more distant galaxy behind it. The Hubble images provide the most detailed look at an object so far back in time and offer insights into the formative years of galaxy birth and evolution.