SoylentNews

martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [wikipedia.org]: 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 [spacetelescope.org]:

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 [wikipedia.org]] 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.

"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 [wikipedia.org]]. 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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [spacetelescope.org] and on arXiv.org [arxiv.org].

Original Submission