Abell 1835 was discovered by French and Swiss astronomers of the European Southern Observatory, namely Roser Pelló, Johan Richard, Jean-François Le Borgne, Daniel Schaerer, and Jean-Paul Kneib.

The astronomers used a near-infrared instrument on the Very Large Telescope to detect the galaxy; other observatories were then used to make an image of it possible.

The initial observer's analysis of J-band observations indicated that Abell 1835 IR1916 has a redshift factor of z~10.0, meaning that it appears to us as it was about 13.2 billion years ago, only 470 million years after the Big Bang and very close to the first burst of star formation in the universe.

Its visibility at such a great distance was credited to gravitational lensing by the galaxy cluster Abell 1835 between it and us.

Further analysis of the data that led to the first announcement has cast doubt on the claim that it is a distant object,[1] and follow-up observations in the H-band using the Gemini North Telescope[2] and observations from the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope[3] were not able to detect it at all, the latter regarding it to be an artefact.