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Most Distant Object in Universe Discovered
The_Jazzman writes, "Using the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Mt. Palomar Observatory in California and the 157-inch Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak, Ariz., astronomers, it seems, have disocvered the ">most distant object in the known universe: a quasar in the constellation of Cetus the Whale." The beastie is about 13 million light years away, making it quite old as well, of course. Update that's 13 billion. Stupid typo :)
Quasars obviously connected with galaxies at a much lower redshift have been seen in many places. Search for "quantum redshift" for more information.
The problem with this argument is that many of these dimensions will be in the order of the 'Planck length'. So a wormhole constructed on this principle isn't going to do you much good unless you can fabricate a space craft that's smaller than a proton. I'll leave it to your imagination as to how you will get a human inside such a device.
I concur.
idiot
do you even read ANY of the posts before you post, or do you just type really slow?
about ten of the 110 posts before you already said this
how stupid can you get
sheesh
Here's your rope: We're seeing the object as it existed 13 billion years ago. Therefore, the object itself existed 13 billion years ago. Therefore, it is at least 13 billion years old. Therefore it is OLD and not young. Now, it IS correct (probably) to say that we're seeing the object AS IT LOOKED when it was young.
To tell you the truth, I'm really not sure. I'm only explaining it as it was once explained to me by an actual cosmologist. If I'm full of shit, then it's because he was. :)
Many Britons also bugger young boys; that doesn't make it a good idea!
I know. But I still hold forth the hope that one day us humans will travel to far distant planets, meet lots of strange and exotic beings, and kill them. Perhaps even eat them, if we're hungry enough.
watch the movie again!
"The beastie is about 13 million light years away, making it quite old as well, of course."
Pendantry alert: ... of course NOT, since if it's 13 billion light years away then that means that the light has taken that long to reach us, and we're seeing it as it was 13 billion years ago.
This should read:
"The beastie is about 13 billion light years away, making it quite young as well, of course."
Co:\
--
Pendant n. A person who, by correcting others, gives himself (or herself) just enough rope by which to hang. Colin Reynolds 1996
no, because everything will converge to the same point - i.e. everywhere is the centre. It's space itself getting bigger, not the universe getting bigger within a greater space. Think of a soap bubble, where the *surface* (2D) of the bubble represents the *volume* (3D) of our universe. Say the bubble is on the end of a thin straw, and starts out really small. Inflate the bubble slowly. All points on the surface of the bubble originated at the end of the straw. This analogy is not perfect, since the straw is not infinitely, (or at least Planck) thin, but I hope you get the idea.
Will it ever be possible to see the big bang?
:)
Just turn on your television
Oprah is the big bang?
I am positively amazed at the incredible stupidity and naivety of Slashdotters! Are you all pimply faced high schoolers who don't know a damn thing about anything? Knuth is NOT, repeat, NOT the greatest living mathematician, not even close! And as far as his argument is concerned it's trite (look up that word before you reply kiddies). The fact that he had to make up a large number name instead of using a transfinite, like aleph0, shows that he's really quite ignorant of mathematics. And just because he created C++ you kiddies deify him! BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!
Isn't "The Known Universe" just everything we have discovered "At This Time"? They didn't say "Farthest in the universe."
Um, if it's 13 billion light years away, that redefines the age of the universe. Duh. that's the POINT.
Okay. I know jacksquat dickall about astronomy. But I have a question. Why is the galactic expansion which resulted from what we call the big bang always referred to as 'the universe'? Is nothing assumed to exist outside of all this? (Again, I know nothing about the subject so I'd prefer mockery to flameage.)
go away, or try spelling zaphod right at least
Well at www.kuro5hin.org people vote on stories. Now, the voters do not all check that sort of things, but the voters that do can post a message talking about it, so the story at least starts it's life on the front page with a correction. Actaully, some people will even vote no for too many misspellings.
This is really good news, all those years where I was thinking that there were missing some lights in the nightsky, I now discover that they are there, they are not missing!! Hoorayh! But don't we all have stars far away?? I know I do! But what is truly amazing is that I am already in my pyjamas!!
Moderate this crap down. I hate bullshit complainers like this who expect everyone to perfect. Get a grip man the guy is human...
I believe this indeed has to do with relativity. If you were standing on the planet 13 billion light years away, a day may pass for you in the same amount of time that 1000 pass for me (based on time-speed time-gravity relationships). Therefore, even though it is moving away fast, general comparisons about such velocities aren't intuitive (Because what is velocity without a constant time to compare with?).
"no sex-hormones please@im british"
God forbid the British should have any sex hormones!
I smell... Astroturf!
This should be billion, not million.
Was that supposed to be funny? It was retarded, leave the comedy to someone else.
Correct. I knew that. Anyone can use a calculator, and since 1 inch is approximately 2.54cm (25.4mm), those calculations are a snap. I did those myself when I first read the story. Then I realized I shouldn't have to. :-) I believe those telescopes are exactly 4 and 5meters in diameter.
For instance:
A Cup, this is a measure will a high level of utility
A Pint, The best measurement for a single serving of beer
A Gallon, an excellent measure for a good store of Milk
A Mile, roughly 4 laps around a football field and still a good measure of distance.
Let us not be like our friends in Canada and across the sea who have thrown away measurements with good utility for day to day life. Metric is obviously superior for some scientific and analytical tasks. But metric is contrived and not evolved. Metric measures lack the human essence that spawned English measures.
By the way, the 2liter is officially the most popular measure of a good quanitity of Coke. Metric will take root in America where it has a higher level of utility than the English system.
Man, wouldn't that be embarassing.
In defense of Forge ,I believe he was saying that
scientists have been debating amongst themselves
not scientists have been debating with theologians although this does take place.As for your other points definition of some terms may be in order. First look up the word philosopher in the dictionary- it simply means - "love of knowledge". All sciences and many other quests for knowledge have started with
philosophical inquiry.Second, the concept of infinity is impossible for the human mind to grasp
by it's very nature infinity cannot be conceptualized nor proven(yet)by our finite minds.
A good example of this concept is demonstrated by
a Moebius strip or even in programming through infinite recursion.However, these demonstrations do not prove that infinity does not exist.
Third, demonstrate to us and prove that matter is not infinite. I do not believe that anyone knows with any certainty the sum total of matter that exists in the universe, although there has been quite a bit of conjecture concerning this issue.
Fourth, the discovery of objects further from
us in the universe can provide empirical proof of various theories concerning the universe, it's nature etc...ad infinitum(please pardon the pun).Finally, these discoveries help to illuminate the structure and
physical nature of the univers as opposed to the
metaphysical nature of the universe.Another thing-
if we have actually seen the begiining of the unviverse could you reproduce a picture of this event for us you may well be on your way to a Nobel Prize.
I speel purty bad to!!
If you see this object 13 billion light years away, turn 180 degrees and see an object 8 billion light years away, would that make the two objects 21 billion light years away? How can that be?
The "thousand million" thingie is nice if you want to make sure you're not misunderstood. In many languages "thousand million" is a "milliard" or similar (misc. different spellings), and "million million" is a "billion", and so on. And of course, many people have a lot harder time grasping the concepts when given a number in billion or as thousand million - most people can relate to "thousand" and "million", but not billion.
the bible my ass
Will it ever be possible to see the big bang? How about stuff on the "other side" of the center of the universe? Or is the universe non-centric? It seems that if the universe started from a single point than that single point must be the center and so it must have a center.
It's called "zero point energy". You probably won't have much luck searching the Internet for anything intelligent on the subject.
Your best bet is to head round to your nearest University library and to check out the references on Quantum theory. Check the index of each book for "Kasimir effect". It may take you a while to find it since the effect was only experimentally demonstrated a few years ago and the "froot loop" brigade has already jumped onto the bandwagon and turned it into a major controvery.
heh, you are right, that could work!!!!
Satan will eat your balls.
Duh. The earth is 4000 years old. The bible says so! Who are you going to believe, God, or some scientists who can't even make up their minds?
If you disagree, might I respectfully suggest you go to hell, since you will anyway.
Yep, Slashdot should post the measurements in it's stories in metric, with accompanying archaic imperial equivalient for ease of use.
:-)
In this day and age I'm quite surprised that in a community of geeks/intelligent people like slashdot, imperial measurements would be tolerated.
Even the UK is converting.
Frogive me sir, but is it not closer to 5000, more or less.
Kinda like losing your virginity to a hooker, huh?
You know... By all analitical annalisys, that was not funy. However I still laughed at it. Damnit.
Not that theres anything wrong with that...
I thought the new estimate on the intelegence of kordless was more like in the idiot range. guess this blows that theory.
(earth is 5-6 billion years old.)
Silly Troll...the age of the earth according to Usher's calculations (based on the list of "Whosehewhatsit BEGAT Whoeverthehell"...in the books of Chronicles?) is about 6000 years. The "Creation Event" happened in 4004 BC. Add 2000 for the Anno Domini part of human history and you get about 6000 years.
That is a good question. Anyone have an answer?
I could probably puzzle it out if I had the energy... ;-)
just what i was gonna point out
"There is no spoon"-Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!"-The Tick, The Tick
well there are theories that the universe is even larger than that, as space-time expansion is not limited to the speed of light, in which case you could see to as many light years as years old the universe is, there could be quite a bit more beyond that :) what we need is a wormhole telescope, so we could view any part of the universe in now-time
"There is no spoon"-Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!"-The Tick, The Tick
> "A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace." -Confucius
:P
i think it was Lao-tzu actually. Confucius wasn't Taoist, and it doesn't seem to mesh with the confucianist view of a life that required ceremony and ritual throughout the day
"There is no spoon"-Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!"-The Tick, The Tick
That's BILLIONS of light years, not millions. Ol' Carl would be so disappointed in you. :-)
...but that should obviously read "13 billion" years old. The age of the universe is roughly 14 billion years - which begs the question, what's really the farthest away?
I know you can do it.
It worked the last time, why aren't you moderating down this post?
Here's another post for you to moderate down. Go ahead, please.
Where in the heck did you get this idea? As someone who has done a little extragalactic astronomy, I can say that nobody has ever, claimed that they could close the book on the age of the universe problem. In fact, most astronomers, if pressed, will say that the age of the universe is somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years, but none will give a definitive answer, but may point you at a lot of research that will claim ages from as little 6 or 7 billion to as high as 20!
By the way, the figure of 13 billion lightyears has absolutely no bearing on the age of the universe either. The 13 billion comes about by calibrating the redshift against H0, which is a number that still has a great deal of uncertainty in it. A better value of H0 will pin down the age of the universe, not the observation of high redshift quasars.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Well, newer, more recently derived values of the Hubble variable are better! Aren't they? :)
I know what you mean. I think it's part of the side effect of scientists being human, and wanting their own latest wiz-bang efforts to be better than all the previous ones to date, whether they really are or not.
As for press releases, I know couple of "editors" that I would love to string up in various painful ways for what they've done to some of my press releases. :)
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
We all seem to assume that since objects are shifted red in spectrum, that they MUST be moving away!
HUH?
How about this?
How about a universe so huge that its collective mass at a distance produces a black SPHERE that makes everything near one seem to be sucked away into a void? Mathematics don't disargue a model like this.
Run the numbers. Try it.
More sane than entropy is, without a doubt.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
1st and foremost you assume a Philosopher, Theologian and a Scientist are mutually exclusive. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is why I mentioned Knuth to begin with.
He lands squarely in all 3 categories at the same time. The lecture I mention above is a good example of this.
You see some scientists after spending a lifetime examining the universe arrive at the conclusion that something is missing and scientists are hammering square pegs into round holes. Mathematicians are especially prone to this because when they apply probability to "The Big Bang" and it's sister theory "Evolution" they get the same odds I got.
Too close to impossible to have happened this way. That leaves the door wide open for Theology. No other theory actually matches all the observable evidence.
This "most distant object" for instance opens to question the idea that the universe is 12 to 15 Billion years old. After all, the Light from this thing spent 13 Billion years traveling towards us. If we are traveling in opposite directions at less than the speed of light the existence of something anywhere near to that far away in the opposite direction would imply that we are at the center of the universe.
On the other hand maybe scientists have missed the estimates of the cosmos' size and age by an order of magnitude.
Finally the notion of Theologians and Philosophers not observing the universe is in itself preposterous. They do. Sometimes it's by direct observation (Telescope time etc..) Other times it's by reviewing the reports of scientists.
Finally on the matter of "Dogmatic Books". It is worth noting that most theories exist for years before anyone figures out how to test it and then another long wait until the technology exists. See the "WIMP" story for an example. Those areas of the Bible which have been tested have held up.
I.e. There is a single layer of silt well above the layers that hold dinosaur bones that occurs across the entire surface of the planet. It's the only bit of sediment that dose. Geologists say it means we had one big ocean for a very short while. This matches up with Flood. Arguably the most far fetched story in there.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
well they have and the argument has been split every way you care to name. I.e. just because you are in one grope doesn't decide what your opinion on this is.
Dogmatic. Closed mind. Uninterested in other points of view. It looks like being an Atheist and believing in Evolution is a religion for some people.
Neither can astronomers or dentists. All we can do is pile up evidence and try to make sense of it.
This is one theory. Another is that the background radiation has a current source. We won't even have a proper clue until we can check if it exists in space two galaxies over and find the same pattern.
This is some of the reasoning that makes this so fascinating. What if the universe is simpler than everyone likes to think ? I.e. a massive 3 dimensional cloud of stuff. This stuff includes all we can see and a billion times more that we can't. It isn't however infinite. Just too big for us to see the edge. It dose have an age but a lot farther in the past than visible objects suggest. It may be so broad that the light from some objects just hasn't gotten hear yet.
The theories may all be wrong. The measurements may not show what we think they do. Remember when all the Scientists thought the earth was flat and the center of the universe ?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The light we see is probably in the red or near-IR, but it will have been emitted as far UV light. In the meantime it has been red-shifted all the way down.
The much talked about Cosmic Microwave Background started out as UV, when hydrogen atoms deionized a few thousand (? might be a few million, not sure) years after the Big Bang but has now red-shifted all the way to microwaves
he expansion of the universe is being slowed down (decelerated) by the gravitational attraction of the matter in it
It is this point that has been contested by recent findings that suggest the expansion of the universe is actually accellerating rather than decellerating. This makes the universe older than it would have been with a decellerating expansion rate. I believe the explanation given for this was 'the pressure exeryted by quantum fluctuations', causing the vacuum of deep space to have a pressure, or something line that.
The Chinese have counted up 5k years or so right? I wonder what they had invented up to the time that 'God' got around to creating the earth.
Just a thought.
kabloie
I would agree that the picture is a false color composite, probably infrared through the visible light range.
Bleh!
But the second part of your question.... hmmm. If this object, that we see now was 13 billion light years away when it emitted the light we see now. Then.... umm.. the Universe was at least 13 billion light years across and is at least 13 billion years old. But I see a (your) problem... if everything started out much closer together then it must have taken quite a bit more time than 13 billion years for an object that is now 13 billion light years away to get there. Ummm... I'm sleepy. Good morning.
"Don't sweat the technique."
Ok, so if the universe has been expanding for 16 billion years, and this star is 13 billion light years away, that means we're seeing it 13 billion years previously -- which means it must have travelled to the point it was at when we're seeing it in 3 billion years, ie 4 times the speed of light...
?
while ground-based instruments don't have quite as good spatial resolution as hubble, they can have much greater light gathering power and, most importantly in this case, _much_ bigger fields of view. modern ground-based CCD mosaic systems can cover hundreds of times more sky in a single exposure than hubble's WFPC camera can. if you want to find rare objects like z>5 quasars, you need to cover a lot of square degrees on the sky and it's a lot easier to cover that on the ground with a big mosaic camera.
tim
hiding in shadows / i hear you coming closer / you will explode soon -- a quake haiku
I don't think you understand how these measurements work.
The HST Key Project you're refering to was a project to determine the Hubble constant, H_0. Lots of people have measured H_0 and get a variety of values. The Key Project people got theirs. If you combine a value of H_0 with other cosmological parameters that you think are correct, you can get an "age of the universe". That's what Slashdot and the NY Times like to report, but it's not the fundamental quantity that was measured.
Now, you've got Dan picking out quasars on the 200-inch and he gets a spectrum at Keck. The photons don't land on the detector and announce, "Hey! I've been flying for 14 billion years! It's nice to finally excite an electron!" No, you get a spectrum that tells you the redshift. Dan converts the redshift into a distance using his favorite value of H_0, which might not be the same as the Key Project's.
You used to hear about problems because stellar astronomers would believe that the ages from globular clusters (based on stellar physics) were older than the age of the universe (from measurements of cosmological parameters). That's not what's happening here. Here, you just have people favoring different values of H_0, because they think one value was obtained more reliably than the other.
No. There is a testbed optical interferometer at Palomar, but it's used for things like binary stars. It's an engineering test for the Keck interferometer.
You want interferometers and space telescopes to look at small detail, better than the 0.5 to 1 arcsecond you get through the atmosphere. But that doesn't matter here! You still get basically all of the light from the quasar on your mirror (as the atmosphere is pretty transparent), and it doesn't matter if it's smeared out a little. There's no detail to see, anyway.
Agreed, but note that the spectrographic followup was at Keck. That's a common mode of operation these days: If you can image it on the 200, you can get a low-resolution spectrum at Keck.
I think that previously, the most distant objects were quasars found by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey folks.
Must be a different Palomar than I use, then. The one I know is on the ground, and is an optical telescope. The mirror is polished to optical tolerances, and operates at normal incidence instead of grazing incidence. The atmosphere there is not magically transparent to X-rays, and in fact it's probably not transparent to much at all today, since it's raining.
If it's at z=5.5, then 1500 A in the observer frame is 230 A in the rest frame, which should give you quite a nasty sunburn.
It describes real increase in distance faster than the speed of light, not apparent speed. What is important is that this is not travel: two stars can move apart faster than light, but you cannot move from one star to another faster than light. (But as the document I referred to describes, "faster than light" is a tricky term; you can move from across universe in 13 years [in your own frame of reference, not that of an observer])
The paragraph about the moon revolving around your head is the next one in the document; the URL I posted had an anchor but perhaps your browser didn't show you the correct part of the document.
The distance between two objects in the universe can grow at a speed faster than light. That's because they're not really moving; it's the universe that is expanding.
That accounts for part of this paradox.
See: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/FTL.html#13
Actually, the estimate for the universe has been in the ballpark of 15 billion for some time. It's the Earth that's about 5 billion years old. Perhaps that's what you're remembering?
"The new quasar, designated RD J030117+002025"
Wow - that thing really IS old - it even still has an original compuserve address.
There are theories for much larger universes,
including one called super-inflation,
to reconcile certain kinks in the distribution
of matter and energy.
However, in a pragmatic sense, the knowable part
of the universe is limited to lightsphere the
age of universe.
<P>
<I>apenootjes</I>
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Oops! Wrong preview botton! sorry....
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Many Britons use "thousand million" instead of "billion".
Sometime in the past someone in the States did not do his math right.
Historically a 1000 million is called a milliard.
This is still so in "the rest of the world" but about 20? years ago the UK decided to adopt the US "slang" of billion, yet educated Brits do see the potential for error and now prefer "1000 million".
The international way:
million : 1000,000
milliard : 1000,000,000
billion : 1000,000,000,000
billiard : 1000,000,000,000,000
trillion : etc,
trilliard : etc,etc.
Hmmm, why do my HTML tags not work?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
By talking about the Earth, I didn't mean to imply that it existed 13 billion years ago. But the region of space we are in now did exist 13 billion years ago. Let's just assume that the Earth formed mostly out of local matter (say within a billion light years :).
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Well, I know that the more distant the object, the faster it is moving away from us. Let's say that the quasar was moving at 10% light speed (from our point of view). The light was emitted 13 billion years ago, so the object is now another 1.3 billion light years away than we see it. Okay fine. But wouldn't that mean that it should have taken 130 billion years for the light to have gotten 13 billion light years away?
An earlier post helped explain with a balloon example, and I know that such an example is often used to try to demonstrate the "inflation" of the universe; and perhaps that explains this all. It just is a bit tricky for me to grasp. I get confused when astronomers talk about such distant objects as being "young", and that the farther away we see, the closer to the big bang we are looking (ie. perhaps just a couple billion years after it happened). The "inflation" is supposed to explain how things can get to be 13 billion light years away, while only being a couple billion years old. If something is 13 billion light years distant, why is the universe not at LEAST 26 billion years old (since if it were receeding at the speed of light, that is the minimum round trip time.)
Drawing black dots on a balloon shows how, as the balloon inflates, the dots move farther apart, and yet the dots themselves aren't moving across the surface of the balloon. Okay fine... Does that mean what we see as receeding matter is still an artifact of an expanding space, while in reality, we are not really moving (much) on the surface of our balloon (ie. space-time)? Is our local movement, due mainly to the coalescing effects gravity, just a minor perturbation of a continually expanding space? Rather than thinking of everything being blasted apart from a single point, is everything really just staying more or less in the same place, but shrinking at such a fast rate that the density of space it continually decreasing, and distorting our scale to make it appear that everything is actually moving away from us?
Ummm, sorry for so many questions...
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
why isn't this attached to the artical that it spawned from? I noticed this on a few other posts as well. The thread has been torn asunder!
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I'd say it's pretty simple. Thirteen billion years ago the object was 13 billion light years away. As to where it is NOW, I guess we'll have to track it for another 13 billion years or so, adjusted for how fast we are moving apart.
What it can mean is that certain objects in the universe were traveling faster than the speed of light for a duration of time.
Exactly. Everything is relative to what we know. We call everything what it is because we've decided that that's what it really is. That's where language comes in. A horse in english is "horse," in spanish "caballo," in german "Pferd." So, back on topic, the universe to scientists (who speak the language of science and mathematics, the pure language of "the universe"), the universe is so big __ because that's all we've seen of it. Therefore, this is the most distant object because we can see it, and we know it's far away, and it's the farthest away thing we have seen. Once we see something that's farther away, then, hey, that'll be the "most distant object in the known universe."
So, what about the unknown universe? well, we don't know about it because it's unknown!
Insert mind here.
Yes, this is significant, since it basically allows us to see 13 billion years back in time.
So does this point us in the direction of the center of the universe?
Could someone search for these things using the seti@home setup? I think it would be much more fun because every now and then you would actually find something.
i would suggest we are too far apart for temporal expressions such as "still there" or "now" to matter...the time differential is path dependent, yes? you'd have to go there for "now" to be expressible, but then you'd not be connected to "now" here...until you returned :=)
I thought the new estimate on the age of the universe was more like 5-6 billion years old. guess this blows that theory.
Good point. Hadn't thought of it from that angle. Of course, no one can say where the unknown universe is hiding.
dTinkrer
--
Have you ever seen a gruntled employee?!
--
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"I think not," said Descartes, and promptly disappeared
This assumes that the object is moving at light speed. I am not sure how fast it is moving, but I am fairly certain it is not moving away from us at the velocity of light.
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"I think not," said Descartes, and promptly disappeared
What the article at the URL you posted describes is apparent motion as measured by an observer from a third frame of reference. See the paragraph with the heading of "The moon revolves round my head faster than light!"
We are measuring the distance between us and a very distant quasar so the case of special relativity you mention actually does not apply.
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"I think not," said Descartes, and promptly disappeared
That's a thought provoking question. Perhaps the calculation takes into account the distance the object has traveled since it emitted the energy. If so, the quasar is currently 13 billion light years distant.
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"I think not," said Descartes, and promptly disappeared
The "known" universe is also a vague term.
Calculating that the light from an object has traveled for 13 billion years does not mean that we now "know" the universe within that span of 13 billion light years. We just know that, based on our current model of cosmology, the universe apparently has a span of at least 13 billion light years in that direction.
See what I mean?
It is more accurate to report that it is "the most distant object yet discovered".
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"I think not," said Descartes, and promptly disappeared
It is a remarkable find, though.
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"I think not," said Descartes, and promptly disappeared
> I'm amazed that a ground-based telescope was the discoverer of this as opposed to Hubble given the limitations from observing through an atmosphere.
;-) Now, how long would it take to incapsulate the Earth?
You do realize that trying to "cover" all the directions away from the earth is darn near infinite.
Analogy: Pretend you wanted to build a spehere around the earth, but you only had one type of object: a interconnecting square tile with dimensions of only 1 meter by 1 meter (or foot for the Imperialists
Hope that made sense.
Cheers
> BTW, does studying theology make you an expert in theology?
It depends. Sometimes yes.
i.e.
Jefferson and Franklin never went to law school but were considered lawyers.
Cheers
> The earth is 4000 years old. The bible says so!
And your proof is ?
Oh wait, I forgot you were reading Genesis literally.
Cheers
> Do you know if anyone has used the observations of the 'most distant objects observed' to triangulate the x/y/z coordinates of our solar system?
The problem is ALL reference points are moving away from each other. (The universe is expanding and accelerating)
The only meaningfull number would be relative coordinates at a given time.
Cheers
This is the most distant quasar, but not by any means the most distant object we've seen so far. Astronomers have found a galaxy which is probably at redshift 6.68 (although this is based on a single emission line), and other galaxies definitely at redshifts larger than this new quasar. There are also hints that some of the galaxies visible in the Hubble Deep Field are at much greater redshift, perhaps z > 10, but that needs to be confirmed with spectroscopic observations.
For more details on some of the other, distant celestial objects, see
Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
You are thinking too three-dimensionally. The Universe according to the Big Bang model is four dimensional -- with time being the fourth dimension. Imagine a cone that represents the universe's evolution over time. The cone's circumference represents a snapshot of the entire Universe at a given point in time. At the Big Bang, the entire Universe is a single point.
When you take a random slice out of that cone its size and properties will depend on its position along the length of the cone. The Universe as we know it today can be represented as a single slice along that cone. Counting backward from today, the Universe of the past can also be represented as progressively smaller slices behind the "today" slice, going all the way beck to the Big Bang which would be the point of the cone. The future can also be represented as progressively bigger slices further along the cone as well.
The bottom line is that all space was originally bottled up inside a single point at the big bang. That balloon you used as an example is all sheath and the air that is being blown into it is the passage of time. So the Balloon has no insides, everything is being ejected at the same time. So everything, including us, is still at the originator point. It's just that over time, the originator point has been smeared out into a giant sphere.
There actually is a "smouldering" piece of energy left over from the Big Bang. It's called the Cosmic Background Radiation and apppears in every direction of the sky. This is because the Big Bang itself occurred at every point in the Universe.
The amount of matter and energy in the Universe remains constant over time. But as time passes, space itself gets bigger and matter-energy has more room to spread out. Eventually, it cools, condenses, and clumps to form stars and galaxies. This all takes place inside an ever growing region which, for lack of a better word, we call space. Outside of this region, there is nothing. Or at least nothing that we can detect.
Does this
Darn, they found it already? I was hoping to discover something just a little bit farther than the farthest object previously discovered, post my findings on a website, put a banner ad or two on the site, and get slashdot to link to it.
--
The shareholder is always right.
Well this is not Heisenberg speaking ... but what we measure is not what we see.
:-) But objects moving apart from each other with the speed of light could not see each other? Well, yes! The read shift would extinct the light wave. Fortunatly matter does only move below the speed of light.
:-)
Ok: we measure a signal from a distant quasar and calculate his distance as some 13 billion light years away.
Conclusion: age of universe is at minimum 13 billion years.
Questions: do we measure the actual distance now or the distance when the light we measure was emitted?
Answer: we measure the ACTUAL distance.
Well, I do not like to point you back to the article, the articel itself (or was it a link I followed?) shed some light on it. Distances in the known universe are roughly measured in two distinced ways: red shift, as someone already pointed out and apparent brightness.
We know that all quasars are similar (+/-x%) bright. So the relative brightness of this particualr one gives us an estimation in relation to the other known and already marked quasars.
In addition we know how the light of a quasar is filtered, well this gives at the first hand only effidence for the material (e.g. hydrogen gas or atomic hydrogen) through which the light is traveling. But on some parts of the spectrum you can estimate the distance, too.
Finaly we have the redshift, unfortunatly the distance of quasars are difficult to measure by the readshift. Some of the red shifted light is absorbed by interstellar matter, see above, this gives informations about the matter in the sight line but not to much about the distance.
The combination of brightness (how "thin" is the angle of light we see from that quasar) and red shift (how fast is it moving away from us) gives us an idea of the distance. The thinnes of the angle depends only on the moment when the snapshot is taken, thus we see the actual distance.
So: the light we measure started traveling 13 billion years ago. But by red shift and intensity we measure gives us the actual distance of the light source.
Sombody else argued about the expanding universe. See the balloon example. The ballon example is actualy a good one but it misses the point.
By traveling with the speed of light, as light does, it is not relevant if the balloon expands or not. So if you do not only place some points on the surface, but actually draw a line between those points (instead of mearly traveling). Not only the points move apart but also the line gets thinned out along its length. Thats the red shift of the light traveling along this line, the wave length grows! As faster you expand the balloon as longer the light will need. The thinning out of the line in direction of its thickness is the widening of the angle caused by the expansion. You see that better if you place a real angle on a ballon. Provided you readjust the size of the planets/telescopes, you will see that less and less light reaches the telescope.
Well, relative theory tells us that the light still would run at light speed even when the universe would expand exactly as the speed of light. Thats the wierd paradoxon
Some guys mentioned the background radiation. This is the radiation comming from the "skin" of the expanding universe. The skin still expands with nearly the speed of light (as we commonly believe). So the measured radiation is so "red" that its temperature is very close to absolut zero.
The red shift of quasars is FAR away from absolut zero
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
a good question to ask may be what exactly "is" mean. Is it still there? Well when is "is"? Is it when the light was emitted from the object out in space? Or is it when these photons of light hit us... From our persepective, the photons arriving here is 13 billion years old - yet for us to see what "now" is over there would take another 13 billion years... Is "now" what is happening "now" over there or what happened 13 billion years ago?
... then again, i'm prolly just rambling : P
Question for all those astrophysicists who read slashdot. If the quaser is 13 billion light years away, and the universe is somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 billion years old, doesn't that mean that the velocity at which we move away from the quasar is near the speed of light?
To restate what you just said in my own words: 1) it took 13 billion light years for it to reach us. 2) that means it was 13 billion light-years away from us... 13 billion years ago. 3) it would take at least 13 billion years for it to get that far away from us in the first place 4) so wouldn't that mean that the universe is at least 26 billion years old? That makes sense to me, which probably means that relativity disagrees with it :) I started responding to this post because I thought I knew the answer to your question, but now I am scared and confused. Here's the Relativity FAQ; somebody else figure it out...
-- People are less friendly when they're on fire.
Define "still". In my frame of reference, yes, the quasar is still there.
If you mean 13 billion years from now, well, that black hole should survive O(10^70) years IIRC, so probably yes.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
It's not a quasar, it's a lady bug, stuck on the lens. And she looks sick too. And 200 inches ain't nuthin'. With 200 inches you can hardly see out your front door.
radsoft.net
I "got this idea" from listening to lots of extra-galactic astronomers over the last 20 years, and counting the number of times a derived value of H0 was presented as "better" than all of the other values of H0 that came before it (and in a few cases, all those to come after it :-).
Seeing the article in /., I was reminded in particular of the M100 Cepheid study because 1) the tables in the ApJ paper are messed up (the columns in some of the tables are ordered in the same way as the ID column so it's impossible to reconstruct how the value of H0 was arrived at - and no, I have no idea how it got past the referee and the editor); and 2) in many cases the number of photometric observations used to determine the periods of the Cepheids got to as low as 5-8 per star. Having something like 20 years of experience deriving periods from unevenly-sampled time series data (photometry and other measurements), it wasn't clear to me that it was possible to get any sort of definitive result at all (the window function kills you).
Yet, from all the press releases, etc., one might be led to conclude that the problem was sewn up. My comment was more tongue-in-cheek than you apparently read it.
Me, I've never been convinced that there is a single value of H0 that fits for all types of observation for all places in the Universe.
(Oh, did I forget to mention that I've [also] done a little bit of extra-galactic astronomy?)
Well, it *is* not 13 billion light years distant. It probably doesn't exist by now. The light we see was emitted 13 billion years ago. For 13 billion years it has probably moved a little bit :-) Besides, who said that the universe expands at the speed of light?
Means that 13 billion years ago this quasar and the sun were at the same point. But there was only one time that we were at one point and it must be the Big Bang. Everything was at the same point back then.
Actually, in a way, we already ARE seeing past into the very beginning: Ever heard of the background noise we've got all around us? Scientists believe that it's a remainder of the big bang. So that's what it was like in the very beginning: NOISY! (As if we couldn't have guessed :-))
"We won't use guns, we won't use bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of and that's our minds" - Pulp
It's the place where the trolls go to figure out who's going to be naked and petrified next.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
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Excellent point.
I know that when we want to submit a story so that it can be denied, we have to preview it at least once. Is there not some sort of function like that for the actual authors ? Or do they think they're better than us ?
i think if you read what most cosmologists say now you can get this answer. it doesn't have to be 26 billion light years away. it looks from the milky way that all other galaxies and matter are expanding away from us, as if we're the center. no one thinks we are, but if you were at that 13 billion light year away quasar it would look like the earth and milky are 13 billion light years away. maybe it makes sense if you think of it as sitting still and casting that light 13 billion years ago. it would just now hit us and our light just now hitting. does that make sense? i hope so. if not please say why. uhhh. think of the earth sitting still and after 13 billion years of travel this thing becomes a quasar and emits its light toward us. maybe you can think of the center of the universe as being everywhere (carl sagan thought this). then imagine both of us (the milky way and the quasar) as sitting still 13 billion light years apart. ok i'm confusing myself, this is tough. if that makes sense, great, if not i need help now too.
- the expansion of the universe is being slowed down (decelerated) by the gravitational attraction of the matter in it
- the total amount of matter in the universe will decide its ultimate fate
- three possibilities:
- open universe
- critical universe
- closed universe
- Open Universe - the amount of matter is too small, therefore the expansion of the universe will continue unabated
- Closed Universe - the amount of matter is too large, therefore the expansion will halt and turn around, so that the universe will recollapse in a "Big Crunch"
- Critical case - the amount of matter exactly balances the expansion energy, therefore the universe wil expand to an infinite size after an infinite amount of time
- we believe that we are living in a universe that is very close to the critical case
- we call the average density of the universe the Greek letter "rho"
- the density required for a critical universe is rhocrit
- the density parameter is defined as the ratio between the actual density of the universe and the critical density "omega"
- omega = rho / rhocrit
- open universe: omega < 1
- critical universe: omega = 1
- closed universe: omega > 1
Why is all this universe stuff important for life?- Age and density of the universe
- the inverse of the Hubble constant, 1 / H, yields the age of the universe
- the age is in the range 10-20 billion years (billion = 10)
- if intelligent communicative life requires ~ 3 billion years to evolve, then we need a universe of at least this age
- it turns out that in order for a universe to live to be 3 billion years old, it cannot be heavily closed, i.e., omega is not >> 1
- however, universes that are "too open" will inflate away to very large sizes with very low densities very quickly
- a too-low density will result in a cessation of the formation of collapsed objects, like stars and planets
- therefore the universe cannot be too open, i.e., omega is not << 1
- a universe with omega = 1 (approx) is a favourable one for producing life as we know it (Carter's Principle)
- distances
- studies of the size of the universe remind us of the vast distances between stars and galaxies
- these large distances are the primary obstacles to be overcome when exploring the nature of the universe
- element production
- estimates of the production of the elements in the Big Bang can be compared with the elements used by life
- element production in the Big Bang is called "nucleosynthesis"
Reference - Tables 2.1 and 7.1 of the text. These numbers are percentages per number, as opposed to percentages by mass (as used earlier). Big Bang Sun Human Beings hydrogen92% hydrogen91% hydrogen61% helium7.4 helium8.9 oxygen26 lithium10-9-10-10 oxygen0.078 carbon10 beryllium10-9-10-10 carbon0.033 nitrogen2.4   neon0.011 calcium0.23   nitrogen0.010 phosphorus0.13   sulfur0.13- Notes to the table:
- The textbook lists the most optimistic values for the production of CNO in the Big Bang. I take a more conservative view and state that no elements heavier than beryllium-7 (7Be) were produced.
- helium and neon are unreactive elements and do not form compounds
- if we remove He and Ne from the solar abundance list we find that the relative order of the abundances of the elements are the same in human beings as in the solar system (as opposed to being the same as in the Earth, see the chart below)
- human beings are mostly water (HO), hence the significance of hydrogen and oxygen
- the elements CNO are manufactured in stars and are abundant (relatively) in actively star-forming galaxies (i.e., spirals)
- lithium, beryllium and boron are destroyed by stars by being converted back to helium
- other elements produced in stars are: neon, magnesium, silicon and other elements up to iron
- elements heavier than iron are produced in supernova explosions
- note the composition of the Earth's crust and atmosphere
- human beings more resemble the Sun's composition that the Earth's
- WHY? to discover why we will have to explore what we know about the formation and evolution of stars, planets and planetary atmospheres
Reference - Table 7.1 in the textbook Earth's CrustEarth's Atmosphere Humans oxygen47% nitrogen78% hydrogen61% silicon28 oxygen21 oxygen26 aluminum8.1 argon0.93 carbon0.03 iron5.0 carbon0.03 nitrogen2.4You can't handle the truth.
13 billion years is not enough for any black hole to disappear. There are calculations and theories that show that a black hole of size of our solar system may completely evaporate in 10^70 years. The evaporation is due to matter/antimatter synthesis. There is one particle of antimatter that is produced each second in a volume of 1 square kilometer. This particle annihilates one particle of 'normal' matter. The antimatter particle's don't come from 'nowhere'. They are evaporated from a black hole.
However no black hole will ever have time to evaporate in our universe, simply due to the fact that by 10^31 years all protons in this universe will decay and cease to exist. So will all objects within the unverse, including the black holes.
adios.
You can't handle the truth.
You are assuming that the big bang originated from our current position in the universe. Assuming we are on the edge of the universe ourselves (maybe, maybe not), the farthest object would be 30 billion light years away. Who knows, maybe the Universe wraps around, so an edge would never be detected.
If the universe wraps around in all directions, and there is only one star (Sol), then we will be seeing tons of stars in the sky, all Sol at different times. :)
I have a question....
If this quasar is estimated to have formed when the universe was 8% of its current age, then that means the quasar had only 1 billion years to form.
Now, given that a quasar is most likely a super-massive black hole, then it would have need at least one generation of stars to have formed and died, no? And surely 1 billion years is nowhere near long enough for that?
What am I missing?
3.Yes, there most likely are structures that are "further" (or, equivalently, older) than this one, but probably not by far. The high energy during the first 1-2 billion years would have most likely prevented the formation of large structures. The first proto-stars are thought to have appeared at circa 2B-3B years from Da Bang.
Thus, if the distance of the quasar is confirmed, that would prove wrong the estimation of the age of the Universe that appears on the same page as a related story.
This raises interesting questions on its own, considering that the page links to an article which estimates the age of the universe at 12 billion years... :+)
- - - -
- - - -
What I find most interesting about astronomy is that there could concievably be no stars out there at all (Sol not included) since if the (second including Sol) nearest star went dark today (or yesterday) the inhabitants of Earth wouldn't witness it's demise for ... um ... a ... very long time ..
sig? never touch 'em.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
>> Therefore, it is at least 13 billion years old.
Wrong. There is nothing to say that the object still exists right now. We wont know that for sure another 13 billion years. Since we have no way to reference the original object right now, all we have of it is some light from 13 billion years ago. The light is old, but it shows a very young quasar.
'speed of light sucks'
-- john carmack on inherent network latency, some old wired article.
See, the real question here is, of course, Has the MPAA found DeCSS there yet?
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
You are thinking too three-dimensionally. The Universe according to the Big Bang model is four dimensional -- with time being the fourth dimension.
;-) I do understand it.
;-)
Actually, I remember the first time that a light bulb flashed in my head about the 4th-dimension (time).   It was something like 10 years ago when I was running a LC analysis in the lab, plotting wavelength vs concentration vs time.   And then I suddenly thought of a point moving in 3-D space, and each movement occured in a time increment - the "slice".   And then all the millions of courses I took finally made sense!  
There actually is a "smouldering" piece of energy left over from the Big Bang. It's called the Cosmic Background Radiation and apppears in every direction of the sky. This is because the Big Bang itself occurred at every point in the Universe.
Which assumes that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Priciple applies...  
Outside of this region, there is nothing. Or at least nothing that we can detect.
OR...   everything that is there is at absolute zero, thus no movement, thus no time!
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
You are assuming that the big bang originated from our current position in the universe. Assuming we are on the edge of the universe ourselves (maybe, maybe not), the farthest object would be 30 billion light years away. Who knows, maybe the Universe wraps around, so an edge would never be detected.
Think about this for a minute...   If (ie, for those who believe in the Big Bang) our universe originally began as a single "particle" (or whatever) of energy that then exploded outwards - would not the leading edge (think of it as the sheath of a balloon as it is being blown up) represent the oldest (it was the first to go) portion of what has become the universe as we know it and define it and describe it (ie., energy that has condensed into matter)?   And thus, does not that edge best represent the beginning (although it is not now in the same form as it was in the beginning)?????
Also some food for thought... the sun in our solar system has been described as a "2nd generation" star, ie., formed after some cataclysmic event, eg., nova of a very large "1st generation" star (one formed after the big bang) or perhaps a collision between stars, etc., and was not an original formation after the big bang.   Assuming this is true (and it's a good possibilty based on the estimated age of our system), would this not help position us in the universe a little better?
And here's something else to ponder...   What if the reverse were true?   What if we are actually closer to the beginning (ie., the originator point or "time zero") than we really think, ie., assuming that at the time of the big bang, a vast majority of the material (energy/plasma) had already been ejected and had raced away, thus leaving the immediate area considerably vacant and cooled.   And then at some point our little piece of the pie finally ejected (so to speak) into what was now a barren part of space (say, 10 billion years after the initial bang), and then coalesced to form our galaxy and the little system we call Sol...   Seems most of what I've read over the years suggests that when the bang occured, everything dispersed at once, basically leaving nothing behind at the originator point.   I'm wondering if maybe some "smoldering" piece of energy was actually still left (sortof like what happens with a real bomb) that continued (or continues) to eject or spew energy/plasma, further populating the universe.   Of course, the theory also says that the entire bang occurred in an almost infinitesmal fraction of a second - ie., as soon as the stuff started moving, time began.   However, maybe that delayed ejection makes for a big difference in the spread and our age, especially since the calculation of "time" then can't possibly be the same as how "time" operates for us now!
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
I'm just referring to my first ever piece of spam, that was entitled, 'Do you have trouble attracting women?'. I don't know how they knew but I'm still not going to buy their product.
High-redshift quasars are very important for understanding one of the biggest mysteries confronting scientists: how the Universe went from the smooth uniformity of its youth to the clumpy, galaxy-strewn formations we observe today. Simple. God did it. I now accept the title of Defender of the Faith from the Pope, and will burn anyone at the stake who disagrees with me.
I object strongly to the obvious astronomical turn this article has already taken. Why do we never hear about the good things in space, like Hale-Bopp's wonderful collision in 1998?
Yours etc.,
Ken Voyeur
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
I think this "milliard" thing should go. It's so much easier to think of Bill "The Billionaire" Gates, instead of Bill "The Milliardaire" Gates. I recall from my four years of German that they also use the logic above -- I guess I just hadn't realized that it was more common than that.
I s'pose I'm being noise instead of signal, so...
--
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
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fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
I noticed while reading the story that there is a link to an earlier story, where the scientists using the Hubble telescope proudly declare that the universe is 12 billion years old. Oh well, better luck next time.
What you US guys call a "billion" is a "million" FOR EVERYBODY ELSE ON THIS PLANET.
Get used to metrics or post your funny measurements in hex.
george./
One cennot think of the big bang as a bomb, because the universe didnt exist outside of the point of mass. When it went "boom" the universe was created yet as it expanded it was not expanding into empty space because that would be something. It was expanding into nothing and even today everything is expanding away from everything else. Are these objects actually moving or is space being created between these objects?
If the universe started with a Big Bang and continued to expand at the speed of light and that this ocurred some 14 to 15 billion years ago, it then follows that the universe is a sphere 28 to 30 billion lightyears in diameter. Matter traveled from a single point in ALL ditections. Remember also that the light from the Quasar is 13 Billion light years distant and was observed with a telescope that closes the distance between the light and us. Also note that the earth is not as old as the universe, planets and stars are constantly beeing created and destroyed, the total amount of matter should remain constant however. Earth is merely 13 billion lightyears from the source that is traveling away from us. Have a good day :-)
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
Number one the Earth is not 13 billion years old. To find out how it got 13 billion lightyears away from the Quasar, perform the following experiment. Move an object,say a lamp, from another room in your house or apartment to the livingroom and place the object 6 feet away from another object, a chair perhaps. With me so far, the livingroom now represents the universe. Yesterday the lamp was how far from the chair? It wasn't even in the room. The earth when it was formed was already billions of light years from the Quasar. Creation and destruction are continually taking place. Stars and planets are being newly formed, galaxies are colliding, etc. Hope this helps :-)
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
Do you know if anyone has used the observations of the 'most distant objects observed' to triangulate the x/y/z coordinates of our solar system?
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
Don't get me wrong I do not disagree with you in terms of actually going out and making observations. But, the question is usually what we decide to observe . The question of what,often begins with philosophical and or religous inquiry. Einstein was trying to prove the existance of God through physics. Whats more, theology as I understand, is not just defined by scripture but by rational inquiry into the definition of God and how he ,she it relates to the universe.This is possible without texts. Even more strictly defined theology could be defined as merely "love of God" The term "Ad hominem" has to do with character and it can relate to a group ie ..characters.. plural, as well as an individuali.. character.. singular. Of course it is possible that I am wrong. Also, I did not use theologians as an example of adding to the discussion concerning structure but I refered more to philosophers.BTW, does studying theology make you an expert in theology?
Sorry to post this again but I did not want to be ignored due to posting anon.
,I believe he was saying that
Thanks
speeling is not my only problem!
I can't add either
In defense of Forge
scientists have been debating amongst themselves
not scientists have been debating with theologians although this does take place.As for your other points definition of some terms may be in order. First look up the word philosopher in the dictionary- it simply means - "love of knowledge". All sciences and many other quests for knowledge have started with
philosophical inquiry.Second, the concept of infinity is impossible for the human mind to grasp
by it's very nature infinity cannot be conceptualized nor proven(yet)by our finite minds.
A good example of this concept is demonstrated by
a Moebius strip or even in programming through infinite recursion.However, these demonstrations do not prove that infinity does not exist.
Third, demonstrate to us and prove that matter is not infinite. I do not believe that anyone knows with any certainty the sum total of matter that exists in the universe, although there has been quite a bit of conjecture concerning this issue.
Fourth, the discovery of objects further from
us in the universe can provide empirical proof of various theories concerning the universe, it's nature etc...ad infinitum(please pardon the pun).Finally, these discoveries help to illuminate the structure and
physical nature of the univers as opposed to the
metaphysical nature of the universe.Another thing-
if we have actually seen the begiining of the unviverse could you reproduce a picture of this event for us you may well be on your way to a Nobel Prize.
I speel purty bad to!!
1.Poor ad hominum attacks on philosophers and theologians do not make for sound logic. ,at other times from empirical observation and even ..gasp.. horror,from a profound insight that
2.The universe can not be broken down into purely "if..then" statements, although doing this has been the domain of philosophers for many years just read Kant.
3.Just for demonstration why don't you derive
a mathematical "if and only if " statement from it's equivalent in English. It is rather difficult
but possible.(are language is not very sound in terms of pure logic).
4.Bacon was a well known philosopher and scientist
5.in Science, Math and in the pure mathematical logic
used by proficient philosophers, premises and theories usually begin with
a hunch aka-theorem,hypothesis,conjecture.Sometimes, theorems are derived from questioning
cannot be explained,(very similar to a religous experience).
6.After a scientist has formed belief then method is used
to demonstrate whether the believe is true or not.
7.And yes science can be very dogmatic in defending it's truth. this unfortunately is a quality that seems to be inherent in humanity
-including myself.
My final analysis is that all possibilities must be considered, all viewpoints must be taken into
account and then let the deduction begin or
vice versa start with tabula rosa and fill it up with your observations.But, wholesale rejection of the viewpoints, feelings, thoughts and proofs
of others will only keep one in ignorance.
I speel purty bad to!!
2 - 1 = 2 I can't seem to subtract either.
Just to add, some other variables might be considered in calculating the distance of an object from us when using the speed of light as a measurement ie.. what is between us and the star, density of matter etc... how much resitance or inertia is there? Another thing is how the speed of light is derived. ,In the theory of relativity , c is the speed of light when it is in a vacuum .It slows down in water and in other forms of matter In fact some scientists have slowed it down to about 32 mph.
As was pointed out, if you look far enough into the distance or the past or whatever, you aren't really looking at the center of the universe, so, at the point in time from which the light would have had to originate there wouldn't have been anything there. On the other hand, if you look at the center of the universe it's too close and the light originating from it (or any other EM wave for that matter) at the time of the big bang would have gone by a LONG time ago. Perhaps I'm way off on this, but since the universe is NOT expanding at the speed of light, nor has it ever (except theoretically for a few microseconds or whatever shortly following the big bang itself) It is fundamentally impossible to see the big bang because, no matter where you are, the light has already past you. Following from this it would seem that the oldest things we see were the things that were moving fastest from the start of it all because they are the ones that got out far enough fast enough that they existed to put out radiation which we can pick up. In other words if it looks really old it must have been moving fast. So we can't see any slow moving old things. I don't know exactly what this means.
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
I think the distance and time figures probably came from a few integrations based on the measured red shift of the object, the assumed center of the universe, and, undoubtedly, a few other things. The changing accelerations, speeds, times, and distance are inherrant parts of these integrations. Both of those numbers work with each other to produce the data measured. So, to try and second guess them would be weird and redundant. Your question is sort of like the flamingo game (each is taller than the other).
- learn mathematics - shoot dope -
interesting. That same setup could also be used to search for asteroids. I'd imagine that quite a few would be found. You wouldn't even need all that powerful of a telescope Then if you found one you could name it too.
Kitts peak observatory (Under University of Arizona) used advanced software running on the steller Microsoft Product (Microsoft Windows 2000 / NT 4.0 ) to seek and verify the location of the most distant object noted by humans.
~ ,'~-,'~
LIE-NUX Zealiots should eat shit and die!
~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'
~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'
I completely agree that these comments and stories should be accurate and use propper grammer. Why bother posting a story when you provide incorrect information? Every statement should be clearly thought out and not rushed when being written. It must always be accurate and complete. ---- KrashAnBrn
If, as some have suggested, it's the shell around a Black Hole, then the shell is unlikely to have survived to the present day. The density of matter in the Universe is far too low to sustain such a beast.
Could a Black Hole have survived to the present day? Hmmm. Black Holes evaporate, with time, which is a big relief to the rest of the Universe. (If they didn't, I'm not sure there'd be much of a Universe left.) However, whether it's survived depends on how large it got and at what point the mass intake was exceeded by the mass evaporation.
There =is= an interesting possibility, here. Galaxies have formed around Black Holes - this much is now reasonably certain. Galaxies could therefore be the remnants of Quasars. You have a super-massive Black Hole, already made for you, and it =would= explain why there aren't any nearby Quasars at all. They are ALL extremely distant (and therefore extremely old), prior to, and only a short while after galaxies start appearing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This brings back something Knuth said in his "God and Computers" series. ( Well worth the listen even for you atheists out there. )
For years scientists, Philosophers and Theologians have been arguing over weather the Universe is infinite in size an age or if it's just very big and old.
What dose the greatest living mathematician and possibly best programer have to say on the subject ? Well he starts by cooking up an equation that will generate a number so big as to not make sense to us. With so many digits that it would fill volumes if printed out. He calls it "Supper K".
Then he goes on to say "I would give up immortality to live for "supper K" years. After all how would I know the difference ?
So what's the point ? My guess is that each time the engineers build a better telescope the Astronomers will find a farther and older item. Eventually they may get to something that's past the alleged age of the universe and start to revise the Big Bang theory.
This won't necessarily mean the universe is infinite however. Just that we can't see the end of it. The next question of course; Is there a difference ?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_program.html?progra m_id=50
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Too bad Zaphoid really /is/ the center of the universe....
I've always loved this little vignette.
I think the only differance between Theologians and Scientists is they both try to understand the big picture, they both get inspired flashes of 'insight' and understanding, but the Theologian claims it was a telegram from God (and some realizations can be VERY powerful and life changing, as if it were) and writes it down in the one true book of facts, while the scientists isn't quite so trusting and faithful and devises experiments to test the validity of this 'hypothesis' - or you could say that ancient religious texts are 'great ideas' that have survived the test of time.
Anyway, when Copernicus or Kepler or whoever it was pouring over the record of observations and *finally* saw the simple pattern of elipses and realized what was *really* going on, I'll bet it was a powerful experience, it matches the data - whereas other people may get powerful inspirations that just leads them to do crazy things. Sometimes just to survive you HAVE to do crazy things!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
adamp
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
Actually, I don't think it's all that surprising that this was done by a ground-based telescope. The main problem with ground-based observations is that the achievable resolution is severely limited by atmospheric turbulence that causes distortion of the image. The main problem with observing extremely distant objects isn't one of resolution, though, it is a problem of having mirrors with enough collecting area to gather the extremely faint light from the distant sources. It's true that you have atmospheric attenuation by scattering, etc., when you are using a ground-based telescope, but, on the other hand, you can make your mirrors as big as your budget will allow, really. The size isn't constrained by concerns of getting the thing into orbit. The giant ground-based telescopes can do very well regarding their light collection. Where they can't compete with Hubble is resolving power. Even with the best adaptive imaging techniques you can only do so much about that pesky atmosphere.
If something is 13 billion light years away, and everything started in the same place as we did (ie. Big Bang), then wasn't it a lot closer to us 13 billion years ago, and so how come it took 13 billion years for the light to finally reach us. :) Is this some subtle Relativity effect I don't understand?
Alternately, if the light *started* towards us 13 billion years ago, and the emitter is almost as old as the universe, then isn't that object now about 26 billion light years away? And if so, how can the universe only be 15 billion years old?
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
It is worth mentioning that we, in a sense, have already observed a still more "distant" "object", namely Big Bang. Of course, since it filled the entire universe, it is visible in all directions, and it is redshifted to the microwaves that were first noted in the 60s.
eh? why?
I'm not criticizing the model, I'm criticizing it's implementation. I think it's good that Slashdot is quick, but honestly: how much longer would it take if they checked for grammar and spelling errors? Maybe 5 minutes; BFD. And if they did a little research on the actual subject they were posting, to make sure it wasn't being misrepresented? Maybe 30 minutes?
Well, as it is, I know they are swamped with submissions, so an extra 35 minutes per story would actually add up real quick. But guess what? They're part of VA Linux! They can afford to hire a staff of editors! There's just no excuse anymore.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
What they need to do is have a staff of editors. It's not like they can't afford it. C'mon Malda - get on the ball here.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
...do journalists check their facts? ;)
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
The reason why this is relevant is that matter + antimatter = lots of energy, whereas matter + exotic matter = nothing, thus preserving conservation of energy.
What actually happens is that everywhere in the universe, pairs of particles with positive and negative energy are constantly appearing, as a consequence of quantum mechanics. Normally these particles immediately annihilate eachother, leaving nothing, but near a black hole, the negative half of the pair sometimes falls past the event horizon before it can find its mate. Once it does that, there's nothing that can get it back out again, so the positive particle becomes "real". (And the black hole, having "gained" negative mass, becomes smaller.)
The thing is, larger black holes take longer to evaporate than smaller ones (maybe because of tidal forces?), and for all but the very smallest (hypothetical) black holes, the leftover radiation from the big bang is more than enough to offset the evaporation and keep them growing. So yes, the quasar in question is definitely still around, although I have no idea whether it's still a quasar or not.
(IANA cosmologist. Or a quantum mechanic.)
MSK
Hell, I will personally drive over to Holland and proofread, if only for the deep satisfaction that will ensue after I whack Rob's hand away from carraige return with a newspaper.
'No, Mr. Malda, 13 billion cannot be expressed in Gazillions, nor is it only slightly more than you made last year. Now let's discuss that story you posted while I was out for lunch. Wasn't there a better way of describing the new AIBO add-on than 'Your cyberpet can new give the fire hydrant stiff compitetion' from the '40,000-PSI-cant-be-wrong dept.' For crying out loud, if you're going to say something crass, at least use appropriate punctuation and ispell!'
.sig: Now legally binding!
"We have identified nearly 3000 faint galaxies, of which nearly 1000 galaxies are of redshift z > 2 and more than 50 galaxies are of redshift z > 5 (ranging up to and beyond z = 10)."
Now, I should caution you that these are photometric redshifts, somewhat more speculative than those derived from matching spectral lines (as was done with the quasar atz=5.5). But in principle with large enough telescopes we can go back and do the spectroscopy and verify these redshifts, they won't all be correct but most of them will.
Another interesting possibility that you should look at if you are interested in having a clever answer to the question 'what's the furtherst thing in the universe' are gamma ray bursts. Though redshifts for these are hard to get it is possible to make speculative arguments about their redshift distribution based on the idea that some of them may appear to 'last longer' due to cosmological time dialation.
Finally, as several others have already pointed out the Cosmic Microwave Background estimated to be at z of about 1500, is about as far away as we are going be able to see. Farther off, you are looking back into the universe when it was so hot and dense that it was 'opaque'. The CMB represents the point in the evolution of the universe when things cooled enough for neutral atoms to form. It turns out that electrons running around without a proton make it really hard for photons to get anywhere in a straight line. At z=1500 those free electrons got used up to make neutral hydrogen and the universe suddenly became 'transparent'.
Incidentally, the universe had to become transparent for the gas to ever cool and form galaxies, stars, planets, and people. In this way and many others the cosmic microwave background represents the beginning of all of the structure that we see around us.
I'm assuming they used interferometry, though the article didn't say so?
And it was Mt. Palomar and Kitt Peak to boot. I've been expecting this stuff to come from Hawaii. Kudos to the scopes on the continental US!
I guess this officially beats the Hubble Deep Field which WERE the most distant objects found in the universe.
Ignore Alien Orders
This is completely wrong. yes, it is "red" in that its very redshifted towards the radio part of the spectrum. since its moving away from the earth, its light wavelength gets "stretched out" and redder depending on how fast its moving. Far away galaxies are moving away from the earth faster, so they are "redder" . If they were moving towards us their light would be shifted in the opposite direction and would be "bluer" since x-rays are way towards the "blue" end of the spectrum, this galaxy cannot be emitting light in the blue end of the spectrum, unless it were moving towards us at a fantastic rate, which in and of itself would be an important discovery. Secondly, since this galaxy was found using earth based telescopes, theres no way in hell it could be in the x-ray part of the spectrum, because the atmosphere acts like about 3 feet of lead to any x-rays trying to get through it. And all you have to wear as an x-ray technician is a quarter inch, you do the math. thats my two bits
The problem? It came out to be 8 billion years.
So a bunch of extra-galactic types dusted off their hands and said "well, that's done" and completely ignored that for years stellar evolution models had the lifetime of stars like the Sun to be on the order of 10 billion years, with lower-mass stars having older life times. There are lots of halo stars whizzing by near the Sun that are definitely older than 10 billion years, and the CMD's for globular clusters place their ages over 10 billion years.
I just like seeing things overturned. :-)
The laws of relativity CLEARLY state that the most distant object in the known universe is a pissed off Significant Other, usually of the female variety.
Duh.
-troll taker
The summary should read 13 billion of course, not 13 million.
And slashdot is very quick, even when posting old stories. I guess if you want accuracy in your stories, you must go to some (very few) specialized usenet groups. Is there some sci.astrophysics group?
Unfortunately, to be able to participate in some of the sci groups you need to be an expert. I really miss those Isaac Asimov's essays in the Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, where he explained things in clear language for interested laypeople.
Moderators, take note:
1)Read the moderation guidelines before moderating anything
Thirtenn Billion Years is a Very Long Time [tm], even for a quasar, it is _still_ a very long time.
So, do you think that quasar is _still_ there? It it is not a quasar now, what will it be? A white dwarf? A blackhole? What?!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Check out this article about how the most widely accepted value for H0 was determined using Type Ia Supernovae.
Type Ia Supernovae are known to have a specific luminosity peak. From this you can determine its distance. From its spectral redshift, they determine its recessional velocity. Using this information, they determine that the Universe is between 12.5 and 15.6 Billion years old. It puts H0 at 64km/sec/mpc.
The Supernova used for this paper was SN1998bu.
It is 13 billion lightyears away, not 13 million.
OK, I just have to say this - and I have the karma to burn, so...
Why can't you guys do even some basic proofreading of your stories? So far, out of the past, maybe, 20 stories, probably 18 of them have had SOME kind of error in them. I'm not expecting perfection, but Rob, you said yourself in "Geeks in Space" that you are now a journalist. Journalists check their facts and journalists proofread.
I mean, come on. You can make a few mistakes here and there, that's fine. I'm not going to go screaming about every single one. But, really.
BTW, Who's jimjag?
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
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// zyqqh