Discovering Galaxies Near and Far

Anonymous Coward writes "Researchers using Japan's Subaru telescope in Hawaii have discovered a galaxy 12.9 billion light-years from Earth -- the most distant found to date. The latest finding extends the distance of the known farthest galaxies from Earth by about 3 million light-years." Toward the other end of the scale, JamesD_UK writes "Astronomers at the 2Mass project appear to have found the closest galaxy to the milky way yet, overtaking the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. The galaxy is only 25,000 light years away and is being torn appart in a collision with the milky way. More information on the The Two Micron All Sky Survey is available here."

Comments

Re:How old is the universe supposed to be?

[SuuSt]

For what (little) it's worth my point was that two objects could travel away from each other with a relative speed of (2*C)-1 i.e. if they're both traveling near the speed of light, relative to each other they will be moving near twice the speed of light. Therefore if two objects were always moving at that speed (or at least since the begining of the universe) and are 14 billion light years apart, it must have taken slightly over 7 billion years for them to get to that location since the big bang requires that they must have been at least somewhat close together (give or take a few hundred million light years).

Anyway, the point being that if we can dig up two objects in space which are (I'm making up a number) 20 billion light years apart then we can say the universe is no younger than 10 billion years old. We can say it's older if we can figure out how fast those objects are moving relative to each other. So (again I'm making up numbers) if we have our two 20 billion light years separated objects and they are moving at half the speed of light away from each other (seems reasonable) then we would be able to say the universe is no younger than 40 billion years old.