LOS ANGELES, Feb. 16 (Xinhuanet) - Scientists said Sunday that they have detected a tiny galaxy that they believe is the farthest known object from Earth, according to local media reports Monday.

    The galaxy, just 2,000 light-years across or 50 times smaller than our Milky Way, lies about 13 billion light-years from Earth and appears to form stars at the rate of nearly three Suns per year.

    An international team of astronomers, led by Jean-Paul Kneib of the Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees, said they uncovered the faint galaxy using two of the most powerful telescopes - one in space, the other in Hawaii - aided by the natural magnification provided by a massive cluster of galaxies.

    Scientists believe what they see is a picture of what it was just 750 million years after the Big Bang, as the Universe was emerging from the cosmic Dark Ages.

    Dark Ages is a murky period before the Universe's neutral hydrogen atoms were broken apart into the ions that made space transparent. No one knows how long the Dark Ages lasted in the wake of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

    "You're seeing the Universe as it was in its infancy," reports quoted Andrew Bunker, an astronomer at Cambridge University of Britain, who studies distant galaxies, as saying. "It's a significant discovery because it's pushing into the epoch where the Universe is mostly neutral."

    The Hubble Space Telescope revealed the first glimpse of the galaxy, backed up by observations made with the Keck Observatory's10-meter telescopes atop Mauna Kea.

    Word of the discovery came during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle. Kneib said he and his colleagues will report their observation in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Enditem