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Oldest Space Object To Date

Posted by michael on from the galaxy-far-far-away dept.

Wind Walker writes "CNN has an excellent article regarding a recently-discovered galaxy that's more than 14 billion light years away. "So what?", you're probably asking. Well, this galaxy (unnamed at the time) is said to have formed during the cosmic Dark Age (between 500 million and 1 billion years after the Big Bang) when no galaxies should have been giving off light."

5 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. Huh by spike+hay · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This may mean that the universe is much older. Maybe 17 billion.That is just weird. For so long, the universe has been 14.5 B.

    Or maybe galaxies just formed faster than we thought.

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  2. On the subject of the universe... by rehannan · · Score: 4, Interesting
    There's a pretty interesting article in the April issue of Discover Magazine entitled Guth's Grand Guess (only in print, not online) theorizing on the birth of the universe.

    Where did everything come from? Don't say, "the Big Bang." To say that everything came from the Big Bang is like saying babies come from maternity wards--true in a narrow sense, but it hardly goes back far enough. Where did the stuff that went "bang" come from? What was it? Why did it bang?

  3. Plasma Universe by Gaijinator · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This provides some more evidence that the Big Bang is not a very good theory to predict things in the universe. By helping to debunk the Big Bang, it also helps the theory plasma physicists such as Hannes Alfven and Eric Lerner that requires no absolute age of the universe.

    Essentially, their theory says that the universe is criss-crossed with plasma strings, which celestial objects cluster around. This forms groupings of galaxies, clusters, superclusters, etc. Its advantage in regard to this article is that this theory allows for objects older than the 'Big Bang', since it never occurred.

    For more information about Alfven: http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/people/alfven.ht ml

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    1. Re:Plasma Universe by sigwinch · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I haven't looked into Alfven's theories, but Lerner is completely full of shit. His book The Big Bang Never Happened routinely presents only partial information in a attempt to mislead the reader; it's unscientific garbage. Lerner's misleading reasoning and selective reporting are so pervasive that the man can only be regarded as a sleazy con artist or deluded crank.

      Overall the plasma cosmology theories are scientific failures. They cannot explain Olber's paradox ("Why is the sky dark?"), which is a pretty damning failure. They do not predict the existence of the cosmic microwave background, nor explain it's spectrum and uniformity. They do not explain the Hubble redshift. They do not explain why distant galaxies look different than nearby galaxies. They do not predict or explain the ratios of the primordial elements.

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  4. Article by Nissyen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The preprint of their article is available here if anyone wants to take a look.

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