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VLT Smashes Record of Farthest Known Galaxy
rduke15 writes "From this press release of the European Southern Observatory : 'Named Abell 1835 IR1916, the newly discovered galaxy [...] is located about 13,230 million light-years away. It is therefore seen at a time when the Universe was merely 470 million years young[...].'
More details and pictures here."
In fact in Europe 1 billion = 1 million millions while 1000 millions is 1 milliard.
No, initially the Universe was not transparent.
Sadly, no he's not... cf. reference.com...
Here is an easier to read summary. More keep appearing on Google news. Try this search. It already brings up a link to a space.com article, and to one in the Los Angeles Times for those of you who have a subscription (I don't).
We can only 'see' back to when the cosmic background radiation first escaped from the hot plasma of the Big Bang (when it had cooled to about 3000 K). There is some speculation that we might be able to see through this using gravitational waves.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
You can think of it (in mathematical terms) as a mapping of R^3 onto itself which expands distances.
An analogy that may help:
Take a circular rubber sheet. Draw some dots on it. Pull the sides of the rubber sheet and watch the dots separate.
Now imagine your rubber sheet started out as an infinite plane: it is no more infinite after stretching than before, yet all distances have increased.
Now generalize from an infinite plane to an infinite volume, and you should get the idea.
No, it was never the "Euro" term. The French have always used Billion to mean 10^9, and the americans copied. Britain has recently switched to using the same system.
WMAP showed that the universe is flat beyond reasonable doubt.
I don't understand your point about "true movement". If the distance between two objects changes as a function of time they are said to be moving.
Simon
You're completely right about the point in time beyond which we wouldn't see any more, and you're right about the expansion of the universe being faster than the speed of light. So it means that the whole universe may be many trillions of light years (or even infinite) in size, but the oldest light we can possibly see is that from less than 13 billion light years away (rough age of the universe).
:)
General Relativity *does* allow separate parcels of space to move apart from each other faster than the speed of light, in that GR is only valid for local inertial reference frames. Space *itself* is doing the expanding, and not the interaction of mass and energy sitting through it, which is what is described by GR. Sorry, I'm not a GR physicist, so I can't give a good explanation for what seem like a cheat in GR, but it is apparently valid.
Your last line is partly true, in that the universe is thought to have had an era of insanely rapid expansion - one doubling of its effective size every 10**-34 seconds or so - for many tens of thousands of doublings, back when the universe was about 10**-30 seconds old. It's called Inflation theory, and it was created to explain why the effective temperature of seemingly separate parts of the universe is very very similiar. The argument is that the universe we can see (and anything beyond 13 billion light years away) was, at one time, in thermal equilibrium with itself, and then this inflation era blew up the universe faster than the local speed of light in any causal region.
Erm. Just had a few beers, so this may not help, but go check out "The inflationary Universe" by Alan Guth, who explains it a lot clearer than me at the moment
Cheers,
Dr Fish