Caltech Astronomers Discover Oldest Galaxy Yet Known

An anonymous reader writes: Caltech astronomers have discovered a galaxy believed to be the oldest and farthest ever observed. They estimate it to be 13.2 billion years old. The universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old. The discovery may lead to a revision of theories of age and evolution of the early universe. The team published their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Comments

600 million, not thousand

[Anonymous Coward]

A tenth of a billion is 100 million, so 600 million years younger, not 600 thousand.

Re:600 million, not thousand

[mister_playboy]

I would have joked about imperial versus metric billion instead:

A billion is a large number with two distinct definitions:

        1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or 109 (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now generally the meaning in both British and American English.[1][2]
        1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 1012 (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the long scale. This is one thousand times larger than the short scale billion, and equivalent to the short scale trillion.

American English always uses the short scale definition but British English has employed both versions. Historically, the United Kingdom used the long scale billion but since 1974 official UK statistics have used the short scale. Since the 1950s the short scale has been increasingly used in technical writing and journalism, although the long scale definition still enjoys common usage.[3]

Another word for one thousand million is milliard, but this is used much less often in English than billion. Some languages, such as French or German, use milliard (or a related word) for the short scale billion, and billion (or a related word) for the long scale billion. Thus the French or German billion is a thousand times larger than the modern English billion.

Of course, the error in summary goes is clearly not related to this issue... it's just wrong rather than nerdy wrong as would befit this site. :P

Re:Distance

[Edis Krad]

Yes!
The universe is expanding in every direction. Think of it as a balloon inflating. Any two spots on the surface become further and further apart. The farther they are from each other, the faster the move away from each other as the balloon inflates.

Similarly, as the universe expands, the objects that are the furthest away move the fastest away from us, thus causing more redshift than objects closer to us. Although you should not think as much as the object itself moving away, as much as the space between the objects becoming larger.

Sorry if your ears are bleeding now.

Re:Distance

[Henriok]

There are. Inflation made it so that we speak of the "visible universe" which is what we can see, in contrast to the rest of the universe which we cannot see.

Re:In other news today...

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Cosmology serves as an object lesson in what happens when you let academics get entrenched

They get to see the handwriting of God, writ large in the universe around us? They explain the very origins of matter, and solve Fermi's Paradox? They help provide a sense of scale to our image of ourselves in the universe? They confirm the interactions of gravity and light, fundamental forces in physics? They explain the concentrations of different types of matter in the universe? They explain and reveal the nature of background radiation that affect electronics, and weather?

It's amazing how looking at the largest scales of the universe leads back to information about the smallest scales of the universe, and both _do_ affect every day life. We just tend not to notice that from day to day.

assumptions

[iggymanz]

Actually, they observed a galaxy with a redshift of 8.86. It is *assumed* that such a redshift is due to both Hubble expansion of space and relative velocity to us. Then an age and distance is calculated. However the underlying assumptions may be wrong.