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posted by mrpg on Friday August 10 2018, @05:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-is-far dept.

After nearly 20 years, the record of the most distant radio galaxy ever discovered has been broken. A team led by Ph.D. student Aayush Saxena (Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands) has found a radio galaxy from a time when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at a distance of 12 billion light-years.

The team used the Giant Meter-wave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India to initially identify the radio galaxy. The distance to this galaxy was then determined using the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii and the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona by measuring the redshift of the galaxy.

The redshift of z = 5.72 means that the galaxy is perceived as it looked when the universe was only a billion years old. This also means that the light from this galaxy is almost 12 billion years old. The team consists of astronomers from the Netherlands, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Italy. The study announcing these results has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @12:40PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @12:40PM (#719887)

    How could a photon travel that far and long without interacting with anything? Eventually it would be absorbed and reemitted by some molecule.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @02:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @02:11PM (#719916)

    Yep, it did that when it hit the radio telescope that we used to pick it up. But, some of it's brothers are still out there and have passed us by already.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @05:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @05:58PM (#720006)

    Space is, as the name implies, largely empty... space.

  • (Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Friday August 10 2018, @06:49PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Friday August 10 2018, @06:49PM (#720021)

    "Space 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."

    --
    "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday August 10 2018, @07:35PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday August 10 2018, @07:35PM (#720041)

    And you thought regular geeks could spend an eternity without interacting with anyone ...