WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers have found the the most distant known object in the universe - a young galaxy nearly 90 million light-years farther away from Earth than any previously discovered. Discovery of the galaxy, dubbed "0140+326RD1" or "RD1", could help answer key questions about how and when galaxies formed, two of the central questions facing astronomers today. Because of its great distance and the constant speed of light, astronomers now see the galaxy as it was when the universe was only six percent of its present age - about 820 million years after the Big Bang. Light from RD1 - described as a fairly average galaxy with a mass and luminosity less than that of our own Milky Way - has traveled a distance of about 12.22 billion light-years to Earth. "It is an extremely exciting discovery, since so little is known about this stage of the universe, in terms of the objects that lived there, or how galaxies - giant collections of stars - might form," said Arjun Dey, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.