Oldest Space Object To Date

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."

Comments

On the subject of the universe...

[rehannan]

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?

Re:Plasma Universe

[sigwinch]

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.