A new galaxy has been found. But

[Deja Q]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/0928_050928_baby_galaxy.html

New images reveal a "big baby" galaxy that may lie as far from the Earth as any galaxy yet discovered. Astronomers say the new galaxy is surprisingly massive and mature for its early age—raising questions about how galaxies are formed.




If you ask me, and you haven't, I think God has given up on us and our greed and has opted to start again elsewhere.

Or, if you can give me a layman's explanation as to how 800 million and 14 billion years can be proven, I'd be hip to it. (not that I think Earth is merely 6000 years old; but the Rule of Law seemed to make its appearance at that point; the latter doesn't mean the former is absolute either.)

[don954]

1. simple, we dont know what the f!ck we are talking about

the knowledge we possess of the universe is most likely .0001% of the total picture.

[Deja Q]

2. Exactly. Ultimately,

it's best just to live. Trying to answer questions of this magnitude is like driving at 1AM wearing a blindfold and earplugs. You cannot see the entire picture or anything even close. And as humans often use their instincts or beliefs to fill in pieces that they have not yet found to make what they HAVE found "make sense", they often end up being more wrong than they had been before they put in the earplugs. :D

[Angry Girl]

3. Nothing is "proven" - It's how well experiments back up the theory

In science, that's how we demonstrate gravity. We don't "prove" its existence - that's a debate for philosophers. Scientists come up with a theory of gravitational fields and demonstrate that all experiments support the theory. If one experiment does not back it up, then there's a flaw in the theory and the theory needs to be changed in some way.

Same with carbon dating. And with determining red shifts and such to calculate galactic distances and time. Nothing mysterious. Straightforward scientific method.

And people say that the lack of a science education doesn't impact Americans.... *sigh*

[FlaGranny]

4. Let me give it a little try.

We absolutely know how long it takes light to travel. We know how far the closer "heavenly bodies" are from us. We know how long it takes for light to travel from the closer bodies back to us. You'd need a physicist (not me) to tell you how they know how far away certain galaxies are, but if we know how far away they are, we know how long it takes light to travel in between, and vice versa. If something is only 10 light years away, that is very, very far in human terms, it means that what we see in that light actually happened 10 years ago. In other words, if you know the distance, you know how much time has passed and thus how old.

[dretceterini]

7. A famous French engineer and aerodynamicist by the...

name of Gabriel Voisin said in 1934 (to paraphrase)

There IS something that travels faster than the speed of light; the thoughts of an imbicile. I think our government has proved Voisin correct.

[Ready4Change]

5. Distances of that magnatude are fuzzier, but not by much.

Some of the same means to determine the distance to the nearest stars, 4-10 light years away, are used to determine this galaxies distance. And it isn't that this "new" galaxy is younger. It's that the light it emitted in it's infancy took 14-15 billion years to reach us.

It's as if you were to see the movie "National Velvet" for the first time today. You might think "Wow, that Elizebeth Taylor is hot!" But you're in for a surprise when you find her today. The images from the movie were captured some 50 years ago.

So as we view this "new" galaxy, or other similarly distant objects, we are looking back and seeing, in a quite literal sense, images from the birth of our universe.

A few years back some images were taken of the spaces between the most distant objects, trying to look even further away, even further back into time. What they found was, in effect, a haze of heat, radiation from the original blast from which our universe has since coalesced. They are now probing the "inbetween" ranges, trying to get a better idea of what happened during those critical first few hundreds of millions of years.

It's pretty cool.

Astronomy is a time machine. Distance is the hands of the clock.

[dretceterini]

6. As a Theoretical Physicst and professor

I've tried to create classes on how spirituality (NOT religion) and theoretical physics are both needed to come up with a true grand unifed theory, but agendas on BOTH sides of the question have prevented this. Many scientists are a dogmatic as religionists.