Hubble Finds Galaxy Beyond Key Benchmark (13.2 billion LY away)

[n2doc]

By Lisa Grossman January 26, 2011 | 3:23 pm | Categories: Astronomy, Space



A candidate for the most-distant galaxy ever spotted has shown up in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The faint fuzzy blob, whose light reached Hubble from just 480 million years after the Big Bang, could be a landmark in galaxy detection.

“It’s amazing that we finally believe that we have observed something at this epoch,” said astronomer Rychard Bowens, now of Leiden University in the Netherlands, lead author of a paper to appear in the Jan. 27 Nature. “It’s like breaking the 4-minute mile in running. It’s had a little bit of awe.”

The new galaxy, called UDFj-39546284, is about 13.2 billion light-years away. The last record holder was confirmed in October 2010 at 13.1 billion light-years away. Both galaxies were spotted in a Hubble image called the Ultra Deep Field, which captures 10,000 galaxies in the universe’s earliest millennia.

Although the new galaxy is not, in astronomical terms, much farther away than the next-most-distant galaxy, it may be the first to hit “redshift 10,” a distance milestone that astronomers have been aiming at for decades.

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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/galaxy-distance-milestone/

That really is a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away.....

[sharesunited]

1. Where is it now, or does it even still exist?

[localroger]

2. Well, it's 13 billion light-years away

The universe has been expanding, so it was a lot closer when the light we are seeing was produced. Most likely this galaxy still exists in some form, unless it's been torn apart in a collision with another galaxy; these things happen. It's quite possible that the galaxy, which was a lifeless desert of pure gaseous stars with no heavier elements when this light was produced, went on to produce second and third generation stars that produced carbon and iron and solid worlds and that somewhere in that galaxy an astronomer is looking at a picture of what was once the Milky Way, back when it had nothing but hydrogen-helium stars and no spiral structure and congratulating itself on finally hitting redshift 1010 binary.