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posted by cmn32480 on Friday March 04 2016, @11:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the sheldon-would-be-proud dept.

When looking off into the distant reaches of the universe, the further away we look, the further back in time we are seeing. Though the speed of light is exceedingly fast, it is limited. When describing distances to distant objects in the universe, even the distance that light travels in one year (i.e. one light year: 9.46 * 10^15 meters) is woefully inadequate. Distances of billions of light years become necessary.

Now there is a report that the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has imaged the most distant (and hence oldest) object yet: a galaxy named GN-z11:

By pushing the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to its limits astronomers have shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the distance to the most remote galaxy ever seen in the Universe. This galaxy existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang and provides new insights into the first generation of galaxies. This is the first time that the distance of an object so far away has been measured from its spectrum, which makes the measurement extremely reliable. The results will be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

[...] Before astronomers determined the distance to GN-z11, the most distant measured galaxy, EGSY8p7, had a redshift [Wikipedia] of 8.68. Now, the team has confirmed GN-z11's distance to be at a redshift of 11.1, which corresponds to 400 million years after the Big Bang.

[Continues.]

"The previous record-holder was seen in the middle of the epoch when starlight from primordial galaxies was beginning to heat and lift a fog of cold, hydrogen gas," explains co-author Rychard Bouwens from the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. "This transitional period is known as the reionisation era [Wikipedia]. GN-z11 is observed 150 million years earlier, near the very beginning of this transition in the evolution of the Universe."

[...] "It's amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon," explains Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Now that is a galaxy that is far, far away! But seriously, this discovery absolutely boggles my mind in trying to imagine such tremendous distances and time periods. By comparison, the New Horizons spacecraft which performed observations of distant Pluto, is only 4.9 light hours away; and Voyager 1, which was launched in September of 1977 and is the most distant man-made object, is only 18.5 light hours away . Traveling at about 17km/sec, Voyager 1 would require over 73,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri which is the closest star to our sun!

The full journal article, "A REMARKABLY LUMINOUS GALAXY AT Z = 11.1 CONFIRMED WITH HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE GRISM SPECTROSCOPY", is available: original and on arXiv.org.


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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @11:38AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @11:38AM (#313561)

    Next!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @11:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @11:47AM (#313565)

    Can't a galaxy be closer but moving very quickly away yield inaccurate distance estimates?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @12:20PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @12:20PM (#313576)

      yes, that is a possibility. personally, I trust that astronomers take this into account when estimating the distances, and I don't worry about it.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @12:24PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @12:24PM (#313577)

        I trust that astronomers take this into account when estimating the distances

        Ok, but I was asking how they do that.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @12:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @12:26PM (#313578)

      That's accounted for. For galaxies that we can measure both their distance and their redshift, their speeds are typically along the lines of hundreds of kilometers per second. The solar system is moving, compared to the cosmic microwave background, at around 370 km/sec (a large fraction of that is likely from the sun's orbit around the Milky Way). So, if we're generous and assume 500 km/sec, that would be an error in the redshift of 0.0017. That's not significant for all but the closest galaxies, especially at that high of a redshift.

      http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CMB-dipole-history.html [ucla.edu]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @12:38PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @12:38PM (#313584)

        Thanks, but looking back that close to the big bang, how do they know stuff like this wasn't going on:

        The greatest kick velocities (approaching 5000 km/s) occur for equal-mass and equal-spin-magnitude black-hole binaries, when the spins directions are optimally oriented to be counter-aligned, parallel to the orbital plane or nearly aligned with the orbital angular momentum.[28] This is enough to escape large galaxies.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_black_hole [wikipedia.org]

        5x10^6 m/s is 10x your max estimate due to solar system movement and already more than 1/100 the speed of light. Who knows what kind of (accidental) slingshot maneuvers were possible that long ago. Also consider that if you look at enough different galaxies you are bound to find one with an extreme history.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @03:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @03:40PM (#313713)

      Not really because that would mean there would have been some interaction with things in the nearby Universe to have caused such acceleration, and there is no evidence of it.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Friday March 04 2016, @01:44PM

    by Unixnut (5779) on Friday March 04 2016, @01:44PM (#313614)

    An amazing piece of achievement, that despite its age, the fact it had a mirror problem when launched, and that repairs have been cut off (we are basically using it until it dies) the Hubble is still going strong and bringing new science to us.

    I mean, it was launched in 1990! Yet 26 years later it is still providing meaningful contributions to our understanding of the universe. A most amazing achievement, and thank you Hubble for all the lovely wallpapers you have graced me with when growing up. Those drove me into astronomy more than anything else. As someone living in a city so light polluted you can maybe see two stars in the sky, the Hubble images are the only glimpse of what is out there to have inspired me.

    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday March 04 2016, @05:27PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Friday March 04 2016, @05:27PM (#313803)

      Also, as this finding has demonstrated, telescopes double as time machines.

      But yes, absolutely congratulations are in order. I too was skeptical when it was first launched (but then again, I was 9 years old at the time), and have been thoroughly impressed with what it's been able to do since.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @10:53PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @10:53PM (#313967)

        How does being 34 feel?

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday March 04 2016, @04:14PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday March 04 2016, @04:14PM (#313743) Journal

    Now that is a galaxy that is far, far away!

    And we see it as it was long, long ago.

    Did anyone spot a Millennium Falcon yet? :-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday March 04 2016, @05:16PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Friday March 04 2016, @05:16PM (#313793)

      Of course you didn't spot the Millenium Falcon, because it was hiding in the belly of a giant space worm at the time.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @05:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @05:14PM (#313791)

    Some of the editorializing made it read like a hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. Am I alone in feeling that way?