Slashdot Mirror
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."
How do you know the universe is 17 billion years old? It starts out as 250 million and is now 17 billion. Nobody will ever know how old the universe really is. Of course, this cannot prove anything. No one knows if the big bang happened. Evolution is all a cirular reasoning theory. "If something is this type, it's this old." Well how do you know how old the "types" or whatever is? "Because these objects were in the type." It's a big circle. But Creation all leads back to a master Designer, there's no proof that evolution is real. Is there proof that can make people lean towards evolution? Yes! But, scientists have already proved evolution wrong, but they're not going to admit it because 1) they'd be out of a job, 2) too many people already believe in evolution and nobody else is going to accept it. Sigh....
the Political Inquirer
No one uses photo plates anymore in professional astronomy -- certainly not at the mammoth, highly computerized telescopes where images like this are taken (Gemini, VLT, Keck, etc.). Charge coupled devices (CCDs) like those used in modern video cameras, digital cameras, web cams, etc. are what's used. Usually they're supercooled so as to mitigate emission in the IR region by the detector itself. They're also many times larger (several thousand pixels on a side) and consequently can cost up to $100k a unit. Of course, telescope time at one of these places costs a few ten thousands an hour.