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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 :)
Will it ever be possible to see the big bang?
.. it's the remnants of the Big Bang, so far red-shifted that they've become microwaves. And now some cosmologist will post and tell me how badly I've fucked this explanation up. :)
Well, speaking as a layman, yes.
One of the predictions that is made by the Big Bang theory is that there should be background radiation in the microwave segment of the electromagnetic spectrum all around us in space. And as it turns out, that prediction is correct. There is a cosmic microwave background radiation that is observed. Now you might be wondering what this has to do with the Big Bang. That's a good question, and as a layman, I can only answer it to the best of my ability. So here goes.
When we look at distant galaxies, we know that they are rapidly receding from our own galaxy. How do we know this? It's the redshift. Think about it; light is being emitted from objects in the form of waves. If an object is moving swiftly away from you, then when that object emits the next "wave crest" of light, it is further away, therefore the wavelength is longer. When you look at the emission lines of distant galaxies, you find that the light is "shifted to the red"; it is shifted because the galaxies are receding so quickly that the light has been shifted towards the "red end" of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Now the same thing applies to the Big Bang, only on greater scales. If we are talking about the event that began the universe, then it would be (by definition) at the beginning of time. Now, the same processes that shift the light of a galaxy into the red would presumably be working for the "light" of a "big bang." In fact, the "light" would be so far red-shifted that it would be outside of the visible spectra and redshifted well into the microwave. Why? Because it is "so far away", in terms of both distance and time.
And that is what we see. We see a cosmic microwave background radiation pretty much uniformly in every direction in space. And that is what the CMBR is
I'd suggest you read Mikio Kaku's book _Hyperspace" for an introduction to the concept of higher dimensions and how they work into modern physics.
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 ?
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Not really. I cant remember where I read it, but recently it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, but accellerating. This already redefined the age of the universe to about 15 billion years, solving the mystery of objects older than the universe
Too bad Zaphoid really /is/ the center of the universe....
A wormhole? Shortest path, perhaps....but Wormholes do not change the distance from one object to the next. They just get you there a hell of a lot faster by bending and shifting spacetime. (Physicists have been trying for a long time to mathematically construct wormholes that won't collapse on on themselves, fly apart, or break other laws of physics....but it hasn't been done yet.)
Also, wormholes are theoretical. So until they're proven, 13 billion light years it is.
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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.
I'm no expert, but I don't think the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Rather, it may not be decelerating fast enough for gravity to ever pull it all back in (ie. it may expand forever, since gravity gets weaker between more distant objects), which is what is called an "open" universe. "Closed" is if gravity eventually will be able to reverse it all. Either way, the rate of expansion should be slowing due to gravity...
But maybe someone else will correct me. :)
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
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.
I had a REALLY hard time understanding this, but there IS no center of the universe, at least not in the sense we think of "center" Every single direction we look in the sky, we can see the aftermath of the big bang. I.E., the "center"- the epicenter of the blast is 360 degrees in all directions. This "quasar" image is actually from a LONG time ago- near the beggining of the universe. During the time it existed, the universe was much much "smaller." The problem with finding a "center" is that EVERY point (in a realy macro sense) in the universe is moving away from every other point- and the farther the object the faster it's moving away from us. Every point may as well be the center, because at some time in the past, EVERYTHING in the universe was in the same point. It may seem that if things exploded outward there would still be a point in the middle- but remember that space itself exploded outwards. Its really friggin confusing- I've never heard a good explanation- the "expanding balloon" metaphor just doesn't cut it. In fact the actual shape of the universe, and what happens on the "edges" (which we'll probably never see) depends on whether the universe is open, closed, or stable.
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.
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"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
There is no 'epicenter'.
;-), but that doesn't matter to us eloi, so that's why you hear so much talk about the epicenter.
An epicenter is a point on the surface of the earth to which the distubance of an earthquake can be traced back.
epi- = surface
epicenter = surface-center
It's the point that matters when it comes time to assess damages and make predictions for aftershocks and the like. The actual center of an earthquake could be 500 meters down and two steps to the left
IF somehow the big bang (great sex?) theories hold out, and we are actually on the surface of a 3+1 dimensional (3 space + 1 time) hypersphere, then we still wont be looking for an epicenter of the big bang. We'll be looking for the actual center - which I've heard rumored is actually a time warp away, a jump to the left, and a step to the right.
However, if you wish to postulate an epicenter, I'd be really interested in the hypothesis. Heck, I'll postulate that there is one and it's our sun...oh great, there's a call on line 1 from Mr. Torquemada. Got to run!
Oh, damnit! I just realized you were trying to say the same thing, almost. For there to be an epicenter you have to be able to reduce the dimensions (eliminate time, let's say) and then find a unique point in that space.
So:
Earth : 3d -> surface of earth : 2d -> epicenter : (x_0,y_0)
Universe : 4d -> now : 3d -> epicenter : (x_0,y_0,z_0)
You were right about the epi- part, wrong about calling all of now the center.
BTW: There are 360 degrees (2 PI radians) in a circle and 4 PI steradians in a sphere. I don't know how to describe parts of hyperspheres, but I'll guess it's sterochronoradian, (stero- solid; chrono- time; -radian like radius, meant ray or spoke). There are probably 16 PI of them in a hypersphere, but that's just a guess.
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!'
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Mayall is usually referred to as "Four Meter" which is approximately 157 inch. Whereas Hale is usually referred to as "200 Inch" which is approximately five meter. I wonder what actual diameters are, to a millimeter?
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A Cup is 0.237 liter. I happily use either 0.2 liter (a glass) or 0.25 liter (a "metric" cup) measurements.
A Pint is 0.473 liter. I'm happy with half-liter beer servings. My wife prefers 0.33 liter -- half-liter (or pint) is too large and quarter-liter (or half-pint aka cup) is too small.
A Gallon is 3.78 liter. (US gallon, that is; British is more like 4.55 liter.) Dunno; I buy milk in one liter quantities as I hate the taste of "long-live" milk.
A Mile is about 1.6 km. Well. Speed limits are usually posted in increments of five. Smaller unit allows for finer granularity.
You see, every coin has two sides.
I happily admit that binary fractions used in Imperial system are much more appealing to hacker/nerd types like me :)
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Imagine a sphere. A balloon. Earth is a spot at the surface of the sphere. (The sphere is actually 4-dimensional, but its easy to visualize the picture in 3D.)
For simplicity we'll say that both quasars are 13 billion LY away, and the universe is 13.1 billion years old.
The first quasar is almost diametrally opposite on to the Earth on the balloon's surface. So is the second. The distance between them is more like 0.2 billion LY.
Or rather they were that close 13 billion years ago, right after the Big Bang -- which is the time their light needs to reach us. Actually, everything was that close. As our balloon inflated, the distances scaled accordingly.
This is of course very simplistic but more or less correct (I think).
IIRC we're prevented from seeing past the diametrally opposite point, because time needed by light to reach us from there is greater than the age of universe. Or something like that.
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Just turn on your television :)
10 percent of that black/white static you see is caused by photons left over from the big bang.
ZEN is a prime number in base-36
"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
You can be a little more precise than just saying it's a relic of the Big Bang, though. The CMB is basically the remnant afterglow of the moment when the Universe became transparent to its own radiation -- before that, for various reasons, photons couldn't get very far. There's a lot more going on here than I really want to go into, but a couple important points: the CMB is a very important reason why we like the Big Bang theory. It has the spectrum of a perfect blackbody (to within one part in 10^5 or so) at 3 K (and yes, that apparent temp. is a result of the redshift); that fact alone imposes pretty fundamental limitations on what could've happened in the early stages of the Universe. (It turns out, for instance, that you can't have had energy injection by spooky other particles, because we would see a non-Planckian CMB.) Furthermore, one particular property of the CMB -- that it looks the same wherever we look (once you have accounted for the motion of our galaxy relative to it) -- is one reason we like inflation, which suggests that one very tiny region of the initial Universe underwent a period of unimaginably speedy expansion. (Again, this can get arbitrarily complicated. But the point is that in a simple uniform expansion, the stuff to our left and the stuff to our right would never have had the chance to equilibrate with each other; hence, they should look different. Inflation "solves" this by requiring that everything we see came from one very very tiny region in the initial Universe.)
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. :-)
That *would* make it the most distant object in "the known universe", or more accurately, "the observed universe". The "known universe" now has a maximum extent of 13 billion light years.
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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.
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We won't see it because we were there when it happened. Since nothing (in practical terms, not talking theoretically or anything here) can move faster than the speed of light, the earth will never catch up with the light emitted by the Big Bang, because it's moving in the same direction as we are (and every other direction as well), but at a higher velocity (light speed).
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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?!
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The microwave background is a remnant of the big bang (ATCT). It's in the microwave range (NPI) because of a redshift. Light emitted from object moving away from you will be redshifted also. The cause of the redshifts is different.
The microwaves are (part of) the initial energy, they've been streched as the universe has expanded. It's like drawing a wavy line on a balloon and inflating. The wavelength increases as the surface gets larger because (somehow) it's 'connected' to that surface. (wavelength increase = frequency decrease = redshift)
Light from receding emitters is redshifted in the same manner as a sonic doppler shift. (A train whistle lowers in pitch once it passes you.) This is easier to show with pictures and I think it's probably understood, so I'm leave it at that.
There are still other sources of redshifts. As light is emmitted from a massive body, it loses energy to escape gravity. A loss of energy is the same as (or causes?) a redshift. (Energy per photon is greater at greater frequency.)
There are still other sources of redshift, but I don't remember all of them. Technically, these examples can be seen as manifestations of the same thing, but that's for some other time.
ATCT = According To Current Theory
NPI = No Pun Intended
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?
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