A tiny faint dot in a Hubble picture has been confirmed as the most distant galaxy ever detected in the Universe.

This collection of stars is so far away its light has taken more than 13 billion years to arrive at Earth.

Astronomers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to follow up the Hubble observation and make the necessary detailed measurements. They tell the journal Nature that we are seeing the galaxy as it was just 600 million years after the Big Bang.

"If you look at the object in the Hubble image, it really isn't much," said Dr Matt Lehnert of the Observatoire de Paris, France, and lead author on the Nature paper

"We really don't know much about it, but it looks like it is quite small - much, much smaller than our own Milky Way Galaxy. It's probably got only a tenth to a hundredth of the stars in the Milky Way. And that's part of the difficulty in observing it - if it's not big, it's not bright," he told BBC News. [ BBC NEWS ]