A team of astronomers spotted the faintest object ever detected in the early universe with the help of a couple high-powered telescopes and some gravitational lensing.

According to The Washington Post, the researchers used NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to find 22 distant objects by looking through a cluster of galaxy that allowed them to see even further into space.

Judging from how far "Tanya," the distant ultra-faint galaxy, is from Earth, the researchers estimated it was still growing. However, the distance also means it is extremely old, and likely formed about 13.8 billion years ago, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The researchers published their findings in The Astrophysical Journal.

"Thanks to this detection, the team has been able to study for the first time the properties of extremely faint objects formed not long after the big bang," study lead author Leopoldo Infante, an astronomer at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, said in a press release.

Tanya is about 14,000 light years across, comparable in size to a Milky Way satellite known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. But one of the most fascinating aspects of Tanya is how the astronomers found it.

"This giant cluster acts as a powerful natural lens by bending and magnifying the light of far more distant objects behind it," NASA stated in the release. "Like a zoom lens on a camera, the cluster¹s gravity boosts the light of the distant proto-galaxy to make it look 20 times brighter than normal. The phenomenon is called gravitational lensing and was proposed by Albert Einstein as part of his General Theory of Relativity."