Perhaps it should be called the HELEN THOMAS GALAXY....
Posted on 01/26/2011 4:56:17 PM PST by Red Badger
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have peered further back in time than ever before, spotting a galaxy that formed less than 500 million years after the birth of our universe, making it the oldest and most distant ever seen. The find, reported today (Jan. 26) in the journal Nature, should help astronomers better understand the early days of the universe, researchers said. In particular, the discovery should shed light on the evolution of early galaxies, which first formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang."In essence, the most important aspect of this is, it provides us with some sense of how fast galaxies are building up," lead author Rychard Bouwens, of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and Leiden University in The Netherlands, told SPACE.com. "It provides a sort of measuring stick." Peering backward through time Bouwens and his colleagues analyzed observations made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
They looked at infrared data gathered by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed on the telescope in 2009. [Most Amazing Hubble Discoveries] The researchers found evidence of a galaxy with a redshift of 10.3. "Redshift" is a measure of how much the expansion of space has stretched an object's light to longer (or redder) wavelengths. Light from objects moving away from us shifts to the red end of the spectrum as its wavelengths are stretched. The shift, known as the Doppler phenomenon, is experienced on Earth when sound waves from an ambulance change pitch when the ambulance moves toward you versus away from you. Astronomers use redshift measurements to determine an object's distance, and by extension its age. The bigger the redshift, the greater the distance. A redshift of 10.3 corresponds to a distance of about 13.2 billion light-years. That is, it's taken 13.2 billion years for the light from the newly discovered galaxy - which has been named UDFj-39546284 - to reach us.
Perhaps it should be called the HELEN THOMAS GALAXY....
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It would be interesting to see what it looks like now.
“about 13.2 billion light-years”
No wonder our social security /social safety net is going kaput
Could they see their calendar??
/mark
Hang around for another 13.2 billion years and you will see.
We don't know that this galaxy still exists.
To have an idea of just how much 13.2 billion light years means, I read once that our sun, at 93 million miles is about 8 light minutes away. I hope I'm remembering correctly, if not consider the fact that I'm very old.
No pic......
My guess is a 63 or 64?
“...beating out the old record-holder by about 100 million light-years.”
Eh. A cosmological photo finish.
A hundred million here, a hundred million there, pretty soon you’re talking about real time.....
“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space, listen...”
— Hitchhiker’s Guide
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have peered further back in time than ever before, spotting a galaxy that formed...after the birth of our universe, making it the oldest and most distant ever seen.
does that make sense???
galaxy fromed after the birth of our universe, making it the oldest ever seen...
if it was formed after our universe, wouldn’t that make it younger...wouldn’t that make our universe older?
what am i missing here?
bflr
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