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Interferometer Spots Galaxy at 40M Lightyears
techno-vampire writes "JPL announces that a pair of telescopes used as an optical interferometer have detected a galaxy 40 million light years away, smashing the previous record of 3,000 light years. This feat, using infrared, has given us a far more detailed look into the center of a galaxy, and opened up a whole new field of research."
the previous record was definitely not 3,000 light years. There are very few galaxies that close, even. Backyard telescopes can see ones farther away than that.
Repeal the DMCA!
There seems to be this great importance in discovering things that no one cares about. It is one thing to look at our own solar system or even nearby stars. But to actually waste money to detect galaxies that far away is a joke. The problem is that too many scientists see space as the final frontier. Most of the scifi movies and books over the last century have either been about space, about beings from space, or use space travel as a backdrop. These movies and books are extremely popular and with good reason, they are fun, imaginative, and give a setting in which anything is possible. We always dreamed of going into space to other planets and then other solar systems. We decided in the 60s to get to the moon in a decade, and we did. This sucess has lead many to believe that space travel will be viable soon(few centuries). Everyone not only is hoping for, but expects faster than light travel to be possible. I don't think it is. But even if it was, it is so far away from us that it is unlikely the human race will even exist long enough to discover it. Looking out at the stars is fine, but to have our money and best minds working on ways to find galaxies so far away that even in our most imaginative science fiction it would still take a very long time to reach is just pointless. Focusing on the problem won't help either. The technology used to get to the moon wasn't developed for that purpose, it was created for war. The rockets, the computers, and the aerodynamics were all developed for military purposes. It is more likely that the technology for space travel would be originally made for something else, then converted. Why not focus on things we know we can solve one day(maybe even one day soon), like disease, hunger, aging, psychological disorders, overpopulation, crime, and the RIAA. There is plenty of real problems and real unexplored fields here on earth. Space isn't the final frontier, its just one of many to be explored.