Hubble Finds a Galaxy 12.8 Billion Years Old

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) has discovered the 12.8B year old galaxy now known as A1689-zD1. Using gravitational lensing of the massive Abell 1689 cluster of galaxies, they were able to find a surprisingly bright young galaxy from only 700 million years after the Big Bang, during the cosmic 'dark ages.' Researchers are itching to study the object with the upcoming Atacama Large Millimeter Array (to go online in 2012) and James Webb Space Telescope (to launch in 2013)."

Comments

The galaxy commented only...

[Anonymous Coward]

a desire for us to get off its lawn.

Probably Doesn't Exist

[Prien715]

Even more interesting, I think, is the fact that since it's over 12 billion light years away, it probably doesn't exist anymore. We are in fact looking at ancient history. It could have developed "intelligent" life and they in turn, could've blown it and themselves up in some sort of "ideological" dispute.

And in a few billion years, we'll get to watch it "live".

Re:Probably Doesn't Exist

[pizza_milkshake]

Worse yet: editors from their "news for nerds" website posted a similar article 10 billion years ago.

Re:Do they cut it in half and count the rings?

[Mantaar]

Since c is most likely a constant we can say: something that is x light years away is y years old (actually, x = y for most cases, I think.). How do we measure the distance between our galaxy and another? No rocket science (but [theoretical] astrophysics):

http://hubblesite.org/reference_desk/faq/answer.php.id=45&cat=galaxies

Though I have no idea how exactly they did it this time. That's just the general procedure. According to TFA that's just an estimation and the exact age of the galaxy is yet to be determined; that's what those new telescopes would be useful for.

What's even more interesting though:

The astronomers used a relatively nearby massive cluster of galaxies known as Abell 1689, roughly 2.2 billion light-years away, to magnify the light from the more distant galaxy directly behind it. This natural telescope is called a gravitational lens. Remember: when you're glancing through space, you're not only taking a look at the 3 space dimensions, but the 4th, time, actually starts playing a role. The sun could explode right now and we would only notice it in about 8 minutes...

Old and new...

[Mantaar]

Depending on your particular point in time. See, I'm not far a way from Paris, since I live in Europe. Someone in Tokyo though is pretty far away from Paris. Now you have to understand that 'time' is nothing more than another dimension. The only difference is that so far we only know how to move in one direction. So if something is far away from you in time, this could mean it's either in the future or very, very old, from your point of view.

From our point of view, this galaxy is very old, since it existed (in the form in which we are seeing it today) a looong time ago. But if we take, say the Big Bang as the point in time to relate to, this thing isn't all that old, but rather new, young, so to speak.

Keep in mind though, that we are seeing a very young galaxy now because the light has been traveling a while. Sort of like... I take a picture of me and then send it to India. Because of the crude nature of the Indian postal system (and the ones in between), you will only receive this picture one month or so after it was taken. So I might have grown a beard. You are seeing a young galaxy, because the medium you're seeing it through took a while to reach us. But in reality, this galaxy is rather old, because it has been growing old ever since the photons that create the image we are seeing today departed from that galaxy to finally interact with our eyes and fulfill their destiny (ouch, that was really a pathetic attempt at making this sound great).

sigh. I'm only a layman, so I might have explained this pretty badly. You might want to take a look at this site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone it explains the general concept behind this all. Ah yeah, and relativity is worth a read, too ;-)

Re:Do they cut it in half and count the rings?

[Chris Burke]

It's general paranoia based on an old pattern.

It's starts with curiosity: "How do they know how old it is?"
Which gets extended to skepticism: "How could they possibly be sure? Maybe their assumptions are wrong."
Which somehow becomes rejection: "Scientists don't really know anything, it's all just belief!"
Then the gigantic illogical leap: "Thus any alternative hypothesis I propose is equally viable."
And then the 'reveal' which is: "So I bet my spiritual guide book could serve as a physics textbook if you interpreted it literally!"

Unfortunately, you can't really tell the difference between a normal reasonable person and a closet creationist until you're several steps in. It kinda pisses me off, the way the Creationists have adopted the strategy of Intelligent Design and hiding their beliefs as though they're just genuine scientific skeptics with an open mind, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Though I agree with you, in this case I think this was legitimate curiosity, and the GP was just being paranoid. It won't take that long to tell if I'm wrong. :P