A new radio telescope located in a remote desert in Western Australia has enabled scientists to spot a galaxy as far as 5 billion light-years away, expanding our knowledge about a little-explored period of the Universe’s history.

Six dishes of the high-tech radio telescope, known as Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), have detected a weak signal, emitted prior to the birth of the solar system. It comes from within the bright center of the galaxy PKS B1740-517, located near the Ara constellation.

ASKAP, located at the radio-quiet Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), boasts a total collecting area of approximately 4,000 square meters, from 36 antennas, each 12 meters in diameter.

RT