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Record-Breaking Galaxy Found In Deep Hubble Image

Posted by samzenpus on from the old-neighborhood dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers using Hubble Space Telescope have found a galaxy at the very edge of the Universe: the light from this far-flung object has been traveling a whopping 13.1 billion years to get here! The galaxy appears as a non-descript dot in the infrared Hubble Ultra Deep Field taken using the Wide Field Camera 3, but a spectrum taken using a ground-based telescope confirms that we're seeing this object as it was a mere 600 million years after the Big Bang itself."

8 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Does it still exist? by Dyinobal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So does it still exist? Considering how far the light is traveling to get here, is there any way to determine if the galaxy is even still there? Then again I don't imagine they just disappear but I dunno it could be suffering heat death and all the stars burning out.

    1. Re:Does it still exist? by Brad1138 · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, there is no way to know for sure if it still exists, but I think most don't "live" that long and it has probably faded out or "evolved" into something different.

      --
      If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
    2. Re:Does it still exist? by Lanteran · · Score: 4, Informative

      I think there's a maximum length after which a galaxy cannot exist; diminishing element returns from supernovae. Unfortunately I'm not sure how long it is, but it's much longer than 13 billion years; individual red dwarves can last for hundreds of billions of years. As for merger with other galaxies or destruction by a supermassive black hole though, its anyone's guess.

      --
      "People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
    3. Re:Does it still exist? by modmans2ndcoming · · Score: 4, Informative

      according to relativity, if we see it it exists.

    4. Re:Does it still exist? by theantipop · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Mathematics.

    5. Re:Does it still exist? by yariv · · Score: 4, Informative

      This question is not well phrased. There is no universal "now" in relativity. You probably mean something like "in our reference frame does this galaxy exist somewhere now", and then the answer is that we can't tell. If you'll choose some other reference frame, you'll get different points to correspond to our "now". So abandon the notion of "still exist", it exists "now" in the most meaningful way, the point we see when we look there...

    6. Re:Does it still exist? by CrashandDie · · Score: 4, Funny

      The discipline that applies into everything, but in itself is about nothing (real).

      I think you'll find that math is in fact a lot about reals.

  2. Re:How fast was that galaxy moving? by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Like another person pointed out earlier, due to hubble's constant for the expansion of the universe, the rate of spacetime expansion can exceed C, given a sufficiently large starting distance.

    That is to say, the reason it took 13 billion years to reach us, is because the intervening space between it and us is growing consistently to hubble's constant; Literally "New spacetime" is being injected between it and us.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble's_law

    Basically, it is why there is a distinction between the "Observable universe", and "The universe". We cannot see all of the universe, because parts of it are so far away that the rate of expansion exceeds the speed of light, so that the light can never reach us.