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Astronomer Discovers the Most Distant Stars Ever Observed From Earth
Cryolithic writes to tell us The Vancouver Sun is reporting that a University of B.C. astronomer recently used NASA's Hubble telescope to see a cluster of stars one billion light-years from Earth, the farthest stars ever observed from Earth. From the article: "That's interesting, he explains, because given that light travels at a finite speed -- 300,000 km a second -- the light emitted from the star cluster he and Kalirai saw was emitted one billion years ago. That means the cluster as it appeared to them two months ago was the way it looked one billion years ago. In other words, they were looking one billion years back in time."
...when you say 'From Earth' and it's actually from orbit around Earth?
"In other words, they were looking one billion years back in time."
So, when I look at the sun, I am actually looking back in time 8 minutes?
Deep.
In galaxy far, far away...
Considering this is /., the article quote seems a bit redundant
-Cheers,
That's interesting, he explains, because given that light travels at a finite speed -- 300,000 km a second
...in a vacuum. When not in a vacuum, light can travel at a fraction of the speed of light.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I RTFA, but it didn't discuss why 1 billion ly was such a big deal. Don't we look at stars (albeit clustered into galaxies) that are much farther away than that all the time? Is this a record for looking at individual stars?
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
Ric Romero is submitting articles to Slashdot now?
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
So, isn't there something about light cones not making it a billion years in the past?
Yet more evidenence that mankind cannot truly comprehend the vastness of space. Travelling 1 billion years at the fastest possible speed known to science doesn't even get us to the edge of the universe.
I remember a highschool experience. A teacher had a record, put it on the table. "Ok, see the hole in the middle? That's the sun. Track 1 is approximately where the earth is located. The outer edge might be pluto's orbit. Heliopause? That's probably in the teacher's parking lot. Ok, so the next closest galaxy is Alpha Centauri, so that is approximately...well, Hamilton." (We were in Toronto, Hamilton is 100km+ away).
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
I don't get the whole "back in time" thing. Saying it 3 different ways in a 3 sentence blurb isn't quite enough. Is this, like, before the Great Flood? :-)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
In other words, these pictures are one billion years, two months old.
A speck of light created a billion years ago looks exactly the same as it does today. Astonishing!
No you missed the point.
6000 years is about the time anything lasts for.
It just so happens that there are LOTS of things in the universe that were in their ~6000 year window for us to see.
In another 6000 years the entire universe will have changed beyond our imagination.
liqbase
1) The article begin with "A University of B.C. astronomer has discovered the farthest cluster of stars ever seen by a human eye " Wait, they don't use they eye, but the Hubble telescope in orbite with a "digicam" on it !
2) And some others lines "That's interesting, he explains, because given that light travels at a finite speed -- 300,000 km a second -- the light emitted from the star cluster he and Kalirai saw was emitted one billion years ago. That means the cluster as it appeared to them two months ago was the way it looked one billion years ago. In other words, they were looking one billion years back in time." No, not one bilion years back in time, but a billion years and two months.
3)More seriouly "It's too early to say what those differences are, Richer said, but he expects there will be several -- colour among them. That's because the older a star gets, the redder it gets, he says. Younger stars are bluer." This is obviouly the colors shift of the duppler effect, and have nothing to do with the age of the star but the speed relativly with us !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
God only made the EARTH 6000 years ago, not the universe.
Therefore, there is no conflict between reason and faith.
I know, the article probably only refers to visible light, but note that we've detected things as far away as 12 billion light years: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/JiYoungLee.sht ml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasars
God only made the EARTH 6000 years ago
No. It was the Flying Spaghetti Monster, not God. Ask the Midgit, he knows.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sometimes I think they are just pulling those numbers out of their behinds. Is there any solid evidence to prove it? I know they probably use parallax for measurement. But further away the star is from earth less apparent is the shift in position, which means lesser accuracy of determining the distance from earth.
" the light emitted from the star cluster he and Kalirai saw was emitted one billion years ago. That means the cluster as it appeared to them two months ago was the way it looked one billion years ago. In other words, they were looking one billion years back in time."
Looking back one billion years they were.
Now they only need to wait and look a billion years to see what happens.
Astronomer 1: How far away is it?
Astronomer 2: In light years? It's OVER 9000!!!!!
Oh.my.god. Using those figures, according to my calculations, it takes the light from the sun about eight minutes to reach Earth. That means, we aren't seeing the Sun NOW, we're seeing the sun eight minutes in the PAST. So everything we're seeing, everything with the Sun's light on it, is actually touching the past! I'm.. I'm touching the PAST. Looking through TIME.
these are really good brownies.
The whole notion of factoring time out of spacetime for special treatement is silly. Other than the fact the metric is a bit odd, thinking in terms of a unified spacetime is much easier. The idea of "sometime else" is just as good as "somwhere else" -- it's the whole fact that the English language is stupidly constructed and people say "some other time" that re-inforces the separation. All you really know as an observer is "local and now" -- i.e. your spacetime point. Claiming the images are very old is non-sensical. What reason do we have to assume there is an underlying universal local clock? Other than it seems to work locally we don't really know anything.
how many football fields is that?
Is "EARTH 6000" some kind of a new model of Earth? And ours is what, 5000 beta? And I wonder why didn't we notice God making it only years ago.
Check out Pandora by Music Genome Project
Check out Pandora by Music Genome Project
...any alien civ that might be looking for us from that star cluster is looking at the earth 1 billion years ago. Guess they won't be finding us for a while. =\
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
Huh?????????????????????? 6000 years is about the time anything lasts for. What does that even mean??? I was making a joke...course you pretty much illustrated my point!
In other words, they have to say the same thing in 20 different ways to hide the fact that there is no story here.
As an astronomy graduate student, I would like to offer a correction or an explanation of this statement:
From the article:
"That's because the older a star gets, the redder it gets, he says. Younger stars are bluer."
Kinda true, but the point is something else. A young *cluster* of stars will look blue because brightest stars in a young cluster are blue, massive stars. These blue bright stars burn their fuel (Hydrogen) very fast and have short lives (~100 Million years). When blue bright stars go away, more numerous, but much fainter, red stars start to dominate the color of the cluster. Therefore, as the *cluster* gets older, it gets redder.
So if we like put up a frickin huge mirror out in the space, would we be able to see our reflections back in time?
It's even more interesting when you consider other ways that we "see" the past, for example a footprint in the sand. In this "light", everything around us is a reflection of the past, so were "seeing" things as far back as history goes. Some of these things go unnoticed due to them being part of our assumptions about reality itself.
God must have done the upgrade at night when we were all sleeping.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Genesis say it wasn't just the earth, but the heavens as well? If we take "the heavens" to mean the rest of the galaxy as well, then should they not be the same age?
Either way, you're dismissing all the accumulated knowledge of science in favor of the superstitions of ancient sheep herders who thought that all the animals on earth were within walking distance of Noah's house. The bible contains equal parts fact, history, and pizza.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Gee, figured this one out huh?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
From the article:
"Astronomers further said that they had decoded part of a computer signal from the star systems in question, possibly a signal 1,000,000,000 years old! It said, 'Please wait, Java loading.'"
'one billion years ago'
"Gee dad - didn't you tell me that the light from the sun is only 8 minutes old? "
Guys is that the only interesting thing in this posting? How about quasars? I recall they were discovered about 40 years ago, but existed nearly 10 billion years ago. And that COBE imaged stuff around 14 billion years old?
Are these individually resovolable in the image? If so, lets here about the cool tech that did that.
News please.
This article has taken great and repetitive pains to explain something that may in fact not be true. A previous ./ story talked about indications that the speed of light may in fact be slowing down. Depending on the rate of change, they could be witnessing events significantly closer to the current time -- especially when we are talking billions of years.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Here's a question for the "young earth" creationists: the math (triangulation and distance = speed * time) used in this case shows that the universe is at least a billion years old. What is your proof that it isn't? Did God create the stars with "already traveling light" to fill in what would otherwise be a 999,994,000 gap in time and distance?
And to the astronomers (since I'm not one): how many times in astronomical history has a star suddenly appeared in the sky, suggesting that its light just arrived here for the first time? I figure it has probably happened but it's not my field of study so I don't know.
[quote]In other words, they were looking one billion years back in time.[/quote] so when do we get to look at earth?
The index of refraction of lead is 2.6, so the
speed of light in lead is c / 2.6 = 1.1E8 m/sec.
Of course, light is absorbed pretty strongly by lead.
The index of refraction is still an important
quantity - it determines how much light is reflected
from the surface, for example.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
...if you're looking a billion years back in time, then doesn't that imply that if some ancient alien race existed back then, you'd be able to see their battle cruiser with sufficient resolution? Also... this brings up an interesting quandry. Seeing that light takes that long to travel to our eyes here, then that means there is a visual delay. Much like sufficient distances on earth create audible delays for sound, correct? This does suggest some level of time shifting as what we see or hear from a sufficient distance is "now" for us, but "back then" for the other subject.
Now, with that line of thinking, reverse the viewpoint. If you are over where the furthest stars are right now, you SHOULD be seeing our portion of the universe a billion years ago. With sufficient resolution, that view should be quite interesting. We should be able to eventually get that vantage point (and much farther) if we master quantum entanglement to the point where we can isolate particles here that are entangled with particles there. Those particles could then be used to study the currently occurring light patterns "there" from here with instantaneous results. I see no reason why we can't use entanglement to create sensor arrays out of particles at remote locations to intercept a wide variety of interesting data. Just a thought.
(puts crack pipe down for a refill)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
How appropriate that is....
I think this was a great technical achievement, but was ruined for me by the incompetance of the article. TFA kinda lost me with the opening paragraph:
WTF? He used the Hubble! Did he grab a shuttle up to the Hubble, rip the sesnor pallet out and stick his head down the end of the OTA?
Also, the whole harping on about the light being a billion years old is kinda redudant. "one billion light-years." Think about it, there's a time component there.
We are always looking back in time since light is not as instantaneous as it seems at short distances. The next time you see the sunrise know that it came over the horizon 8 minutes ago.
That the universe is regarded as between 13 and 17 billion years old? Those stars that have been seen are older than 1 billion light years then correct?
You may wish to re-read your Bible. Says nothing about the universe being only 6K. "In the beginning God create the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void..." The mentions about actually doing something useful by way of flora and fauna with the earth did not necessarily occur during this time period. Quite possibly this occurred later. Checking the "was" in the original language and there's reason to believe that it should well have been a "became."
There no mention of however long things were happening before, during or after the "was[became] without form and void". More over no where does it say how long Adam and Eve hung out in the garden. There's really no time references anywhere save for the first through seventh days some time arbitrarily following the initial creation.
This 6000 year crap came along much later based upon foolishly reading more into things not written. It caught on for some reason and has been the bane and laugh of most everyone ever since.
--Neth
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
they were looking an entire year more than 999,999,999 years back in time or GET THIS! 2 years more than 999,999,998 years. Plus two months if they are looking at it again after two months have passed. Imagine how much further back future generations will be looking when they look at this. Why 999,999,999 years into the future, they will be looking back almost two billion years.. My head is spinning as I try to assimilate all the isight presented by the presenter of this wonderful presentation to be presented on /.....I'm gonna toss my cookies now
Well, since you asked.. :)
The Genesis account does clearly state the light was created before the stars. Look at the order of the days. Also, the universe a whole being created before the created before the days started counting, with no time specification regarding the gap between. Whether the account is correct or not is for another analysis, but that one at least is a simple read what you're arguing with first.
Cool. Now we know what light looked like a billion years ago. I bet we can project what it'll look like a billion from now!
My kid knows this stuff.
That means the cluster as it appeared to them two months ago was the way it looked one billion years ago. In other words, they were looking one billion years back in time.DUH... Think so? How bad does TFA need to be dumbed down?
BTW - Haven't seen the word 'billions' so much since Carl Sagan's book! Think we got the point on the first reference!
I thought blue ment it was moving toward us, and red was away.
See the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift
So how reliable is using blue shift and red shift to determine both age of the star, and weither it is moving towards us or away.
So while blue star clusters could be younger, couldn't it just an older start that is moving toward us?
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
The whole universe was just created 6000 years ago. That star 1 billion light years away is also just 6000 years old. It was created along with the stream of photons stretching all the way from here to there so that it appears to shine steadily. BTW all the dino fossils? they too was created 6000 years ago along with the Earth's crust. It will all be explained very clearly in my forthcoming book The Theory of Intelligent Shining. For advance copy, please send me 79.99$.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I couldn't refrain from the obvious... Dark Helmet: What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen? Colonel Sandurz: Now. You're looking at now sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now. Dark Helmet: What happened to then? Colonel Sandurz: We passed then. Dark Helmet: When? Colonel Sandurz: Just now. We're at now, now. Dark Helmet: Go back to then! Colonel Sandurz: When? Dark Helmet: Now. Colonel Sandurz: Now? Dark Helmet: Now! Colonel Sandurz: I can't. Dark Helmet: Why? Colonel Sandurz: We missed it. Dark Helmet: When? Colonel Sandurz: Just now. Dark Helmet: When will then be now? Colonel Sandurz: Soon.
Physics is (in present terms, by definition) exactly the study of the observable. Theology is (when once you have grasped the notion of omnipotence and its implications for your ability to reason) the study of things deep into the unobservable. They cannot possibly come into conflict - unless you have gone to a lot of extra effort to believe rubbish that conflicts with both sets of thought! ;)
Faith counts on three things:
1) God exists outside our reality, and can manipulate said reality at will in any way he wishes. So yes, dropping light in already running or whatever for the creator of the universe that set up the laws, set things running, and generally manipulates every aspect is not impossible. In fact, it's probably not even sweat inducing.
2) We don't understand what reality is, philosophically or scientifically, so there's no way to logically argue against it except to say "You can't offer me any proof of your view." which is the same argument the faithful can propose as well to unbelievers. That's why while your argument is logical based on empirical observation, you'll never convince a Creationist of anything. Your underlying premise required for your argument counts on their underlying premise being proven untrue. Good luck with that.
3) You must accept that a God exists, is omnipresent, and is omniscient before you will believe he can accomplish #1. Without this belief, the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards in a stiff wind.
Absolute and complete faith in God, by definition, cannot be reconciled where it directly conflicts with science in a particular religious interpretation of reality. Don't bother arguing with people about it, it's just a waste of time. Instead just go help a scientist work towards proving them wrong if you want to make any progress with your energy.
Don't be fooled by this post ... the article KFG links to doesn't contain any reference to ponies or horses what so ever.
For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
"Sunrise" is a visual event involving an observer (you), a horizon, and the Sun. Disregarding the observer, the "place" where this event happens is where the object nearest to the observer is found, and that object is the horizon, which is usually pretty close to you. The light hitting your eyes may be 8 minutes old, but the shadow from your horizon isn't.
Saying that the sunrise occurs 8 minutes before you see it is like saying that it will take 8 minutes for you to see the effect of blinking your own eyelids. That's clearly not true.
Now go visit your nearest horizon to see the sunrise happen on location, and instantly rather than delayed. :-)
I note with a certain amount of scientific curiosity and indeed scepticism that nowhere in the article is the effective red shift for this one billion light year distance noted. This seems like a designed in effort to get some ink with no real hard data to prove that claim because its the red shift times the hubble that is the usual astronomical yardstick for measuring such distances.
I don't know how to convert from hubble constant, eg red shift, to distances, but we do have a couple of spots on the images here and there whose red shifts have approached if not exceeded 5.0. Meaning they are so far away that a given line in their spectrum has been red shifted until it is now 5 times its original wavelength. Considering that the visible universe has now been calculated at 13.7 billion light years, the age of the universe in other words, and we cannot see beyond because it would be effectively looking back before the big bang. When we do look back that far, what we see is the afterglow of the big bang in the nominally 2.7 degree Kelvin radiation that permeates the universe we can see.
Someone more versed in the math should tell us what the red shift is at 1 billion years, but I have serious, really serious doubts that its much more than 1.9 or so. If thats true, then this claim should be treated for what it is, another grant money grab. Someone throwing out big numbers because the real red shift numbers aren't that big.
Now, somebody do the math and correct me if I'm grossly wrong.
--
Cheers, Gene
Shouldn't that be the way it looked one billion years and two months ago?
This space unintentionally left blank.
Haha, jokes, I get jokes. /homer
Your teacher was way, way off. Ten years ago I created a spreadsheet for myself to get a better idea of how big our universe is.
One of the calculations scaled 1 AU (Sun-Earth distance) down to 1 mm:
Sun to Earth: 1.0 mm
Sun to Mars: 1.5 mm
Sun to Jupiter: 5.2 mm
Sun to Saturn: 9.6 mm
Sun to Uranus: 1.9 cm
Sun to Neptune: 3.0 cm
Sun to Pluto: 4.0 cm
Sun to Kuiper belt: 4.0 cm
Sun to Oort Cloud: 10 m
Sun to Proxima Centauri: 267 m
Sun to Tau Ceti: 772 m
Milky Way galaxy diameter: 6,327 km
Milky Way to Andromeda galaxy: 139,200 km
Milky Way to galaxy 0140+326RD1*: 759,000,000 km'
*) At 12 billion light-years, the farthest known galaxy at the time.
') Almost as far as Jupiter is from the Sun.
Conclusion: the universe is really, really, really, really big. It makes the idea of even reaching the next star seem like a pretty wacky proposition.
I was MAKING FUN of the young earth crowd...I don't believe in the earth being young...Aghh.
They even mention them in the article: Last year in Prague, Richer had the distinction of introducing to the International Astronomical Union the first hard evidence of when the first stars formed -- about 12 billion years ago, or a billion years after the universe began.
He did that by identifying and photographing the faintest stars ever seen, because the fainter a star is, the older it is. I think the article is a bit off on the actual facts, maybe they meant the stars theyre seeing now were formed a billion years after the big bang? They contradict themselves.
In any case, stars a billion years old aren't that exciting, its the 12 billion year ones, at the edge of observable space that get things interesting (they're early-generation stars, formed of primarily hydrogen as opposed to other later-generation stars that are formed of hydrogen plus heavier elements created by previous long-dead stars. So the earlier ones have a lot different properties and can get a lot larger)
What gives... this is 13 billion year http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040309.html the new one is only one billion?
I don't understand why this is such big news. There are pictures of galaxies that go back to less than a billion years after the big bang, i.e about 13 billion years. Here's one: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4756. Now that is fricking amazing. There are better photos, I just did a quick Google to get this one.
When the light left those galaxies/quasars/whatever 13 billion years ago, the universe was much smaller than it is now. So that 13 billion light year radius sphere surrounding us was only a 500 million light year sphere at the time, yet the light has taken 13 billion year to get here. (Actually, the universe is not really a sphere. It's some warped dimensional thing that I can't possibly understand.)
So what's the big deal about 1 billion light years?
Didn't they determine that the universe was 15 billion years old (there abouts) because they observed light from stars 15 billion light years away? That's what I remember from intro to astronomy anyway. Plus, look at this http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/ 2007/01/image/a/format/web_print doesn't that say 6.5 billion years ago, as in the light observed has traveled 6.5 billion light years? So what's the big deal about one billion? I don't get it. Oh wait, he was standing on the planet Earth when he saw them...ok, big whoop.
There is nothing to wonder about at all. Hubble's resolution is fixed by the the size of its mirror and the wave nature of light. The seeing is perfect in space, but you can only see so much with an objective of a particular size. With adaptive optics and various sorts of image processing, ground-based telescopes now equal, or even exceed, Hubble's resolution. In space they would do better, but on the ground they are very good.
The Hubble pictures of the planets are more than "decent", and they're far from a joke - they're excellent. What more do you want?
...laura
We are now letting Canadians use our telescope and take credit for the things they happen to see through it? What is the world coming to?!?
3rd world country: how much is that in SOCCER fieldS?
:P
ah! now i get it!
In other news, a 300 Watt power supply uses as much power as three 100W light bulbs (I think that line was actually used here a few months ago.)
Stop thinking of photons as particles. There are times and places where it's convenient and simple to think of them as such, but quantum entanglement isn't really one of them. To make any sense of it, you need to consider each as an entangled wave function. Unobserved, you can have each particle take any arbitrary number of paths through space time, which allows for interference patterns and fringes. Once you observe one part of the entangled wave function, you have collapsed BOTH of them, resulting in a particular outcome for the entangled photons.
Well, your assumption that I own a bible aside, I was not trying to say anything about the age of the earth and the galaxy, merely trying to use logic (in response to a religious post? what was I thinking?) to try to show what I thought was an error in the parent's post.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
>What is your proof that it isn't?
;)
...
That God says so.
Actually, I wasn't claiming that I had "proof", but
*you* are (or at least, that you have "proof" to the
contrary).
>Did God create the stars with "already traveling
>light" to fill in what would otherwise be a 999,994,000
>gap in time and distance?
Maybe. You're not getting this "all powerful" thing, are
you?
Anyway, what with all the time dilation and other exotica
involved in this topic, I'm not sure this is the place to
play arrogant creation-basher
I think the planet of Magrathea is about 6000 light years away. When Slartibartfast was designing the Fjords and subcontracting the installation of the fake dinasour fossils, the mice who were running the factory and building the Earth realized they had a major problem:
Someone had accidently made a typo on the decimal place in the progress bar subroutines, so instead of taking about 5 to 6 thousand years, the program would take 5 million years.
The project was hopelessy behind schedule, over budget, and doomed. The only thing the mice could do was push the project in time until the program had sufficent time to complete, even before Deep Thought had been created. Deep Thought and The Answer disapeared, lost in time forever. Postcards of Deep Thought suddenly became very valuable.
No one had heard of the answer until a woman asked the question "what do you get if you multiply 6 times 7?"
Then the Vogons arrived...
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."