Distant Universe

[Drone]

The most distant galaxy ever detected. It's called MACS 1149-JD and it's .... 13.2 billion light-years away

In the big image at left, the many galaxies of a massive cluster called MACS J1149+2223 dominate the scene. Gravitational lensing by the giant cluster brightened the light from the newfound galaxy, known as MACS 1149-JD, some 15 times. At upper right, a partial zoom-in shows MACS 1149-JD in more detail, and a deeper zoom appears to the lower right. Light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching NASA's telescopes. The galaxy has a redshift, or "z," of 9.6.

That's really far away.

http://phys.org/news/2012-09-astrophysicists-spy-ultra-distant-galaxy-cosmic.html

The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called "Dark Ages." During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. These first galaxies likely played the dominant role in the epoch of reionization, the event that signaled the demise of the universe's Dark Ages. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, neutral hydrogen gas formed from cooling particles. The first luminous stars and their host galaxies, however, did not emerge until a few hundred million years later. The energy released by these earliest galaxies is thought to have caused the neutral hydrogen strewn throughout the universe to ionize, or lose an electron, the state in which the gas has remained since that time.

It was really hard to detect it, say thanks to gravitational lensing and strongest telescopes, but unlike previous detections of galaxy candidates in this age range, which were only glimpsed in a single color, this newfound galaxy has been seen in five different wavebands.

Objects at these extreme distances are mostly beyond the detection sensitivity of today's largest telescopes. To catch sight of these early, distant galaxies, astronomers rely on "gravitational lensing". In this phenomenon - predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago - the gravity of foreground objects warps and magnifies the light from background objects. A massive galaxy cluster situated between our galaxy and the early galaxy magnified the latter's light, brightening the remote object some 15 times and bringing it into view. Based on the Spitzer and Hubble observations, astronomers think the distant galaxy was spied at a time when it was less than 200 million years old. It also is small and compact, containing only about 1% of the Milky Way's mass. According to leading cosmological theories, the first galaxies should indeed have started out tiny. They then progressively merged, eventually accumulating into the sizable galaxies of the more modern universe.

Totally unrelated: btw the oldest object, a star called HE 1523-0901 which is 13.2 billion years old located only 7500 ly from Earth.

And one of the oldest globular clusters is M15, located in the constellation Pegasus (~ 35000 ly away). It's 12 billion years old.

 

[Aquinus]

If something is 13 billion light years away, aren't we seeing that galaxy from 13 billion years ago since it takes billions of years for the light to actually get to us? So wouldn't it be more accurate that this galaxy was 13 billion light years away from us, 13 billion years ago and we might be witnessing something that happened in the past? So technically wouldn't that mean that it was a protocluster that long ago? Couldn't it be very possible that the galaxy has already formed and we just haven't seen it yet?

 

[Drone]

So wouldn't it be more accurate that this galaxy was 13 billion light years away from us, 13 billion years ago and we might be witnessing something that happened in the past? So technically wouldn't that mean that it was a protocluster that long ago? Couldn't it be very possible that the galaxy has already formed and we just haven't seen it yet?

In the article (and so in my post above) it's said that galaxy is less than 200 million years old (not even a toddler). Indeed it was so 13.2 billion years ago. Now that galaxy is full grown but to see it you need to wait another 13.2 billion years.

 

[Aquinus]

In the article (and so in my post above) it's said that galaxy is less than 200 million years old (not even a toddler). Indeed it was so 13.2 billion years ago. Now that galaxy is full grown but to see it you need to wait another 13.2 billion years.

That just means that the galaxy is 13.4 billion years old, and we're seeing it from 13.2 billion years ago. We're just seeing the past, the galaxy isn't actually that young. It's more of a "how things used to be." So we can't say its forming because over 13.2 billion years, it most likely has mostly formed by now. Just because we haven't seen it yet doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

"If a tree in the forest falls and there is no one to hear it, did the tree actually make a noise when it fell?"

 

[Drone]

Just because we haven't seen it yet doesn't mean it hasn't happened.

"If a tree in the forest falls and there is no one to hear it, did the tree actually make a noise when it fell?"

That can be said just about everything you see in everyday life It happens because it's limited by speed of light. Carl Sagan explained it well with a "magical camera".

Your nose is just a little closer to me than your ears. Light reflected off your nose reaches me just an instant in time before your ears. But suppose I had a magic camera so that I could see your nose and your ears at precisely the same instant. With such a camera you could take some pretty interesting pictures.

 

[Easy Rhino]

If something is 13 billion light years away, aren't we seeing that galaxy from 13 billion years ago since it takes billions of years for the light to actually get to us? So wouldn't it be more accurate that this galaxy was 13 billion light years away from us, 13 billion years ago and we might be witnessing something that happened in the past? So technically wouldn't that mean that it was a protocluster that long ago? Couldn't it be very possible that the galaxy has already formed and we just haven't seen it yet?

when you look through a telescope you are indeed time traveling. hell, if you have working eyes you are time traveling. the computer monitor that you see in front of you...well that image your brain processed is of how that monitor existed 0.000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds ago. so the computer monitor you "see" is not the same one that actually exists the moment you see it. now try and fall asleep tonight

 

[Aquinus]

when you look through a telescope you are indeed time traveling. hell, if you have working eyes you are time traveling. the computer monitor that you see in front of you...well that image your brain processed is of how that monitor existed 0.000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds ago. so the computer monitor you "see" is not the same one that actually exists the moment you see it. now try and fall asleep tonight

.000000000000001 seconds is a little less than 13.2 billion years. Also, your brain needs to interpret what you're seeing, so it's a little longer so you're working in the millisecond range.

The point I'm trying to say is that the time it takes light to get to you at a monitor isn't significant because very little changes have taken place since the light was emitted and when you saw it. Another galaxy on the other hand is nothing like it is right now, with how we're seeing it. That's all I'm saying.

 

[Drone]

It would be awesome when future humans will travel for long distances. Then they could look back from some distant galaxy at young Earth and see how life formed.

 

[Easy Rhino]

.000000000000001 seconds is a little less than 13.2 billion years. Also, your brain needs to interpret what you're seeing, so it's a little longer so you're working in the millisecond range.

The point I'm trying to say is that the time it takes light to get to you at a monitor isn't significant because very little changes have taken place since the light was emitted and when you saw it. Another galaxy on the other hand is nothing like it is right now, with how we're seeing it. That's all I'm saying.

well duh. but it still shows the point of relativity. perception is reality to all living creatures.

 

[Benetanegia]

It would be awesome when future humans will travel for long distances. Then they could look back from some distant galaxy at young Earth and see how life formed.

As stupid as it sounds, I never thought of that. What a practical way of learning history!! Amazing stuff.

 

[Drone]

As stupid as it sounds, I never thought of that. What a practical way of learning history!! Amazing stuff.

Lol yeah but I was only 50% serious about that. Let's say we travel 50 000 light years away and look back. How strong a telescope has to be to see what's happening on Earth's surface. How far could we zoom in

 

[Easy Rhino]

Lol yeah but I was only 50% serious about that. Let's say we travel 50 000 light years away and look back. How strong a telescope has to be to see what's happening on Earth's surface. How far could we zoom in

you would have to travel faster than the speed of light for it to work which would essentially be traveling through time.

 

[phanbuey]

As stupid as it sounds, I never thought of that. What a practical way of learning history!! Amazing stuff.

we would have to teleport a few billion light years away, and then point a telescope powerful enough to record what little incoming light is left.

or we could just record history by making up stuff for the parts that we dont know/like like we have always done .

 

[Drone]

you would have to travel faster than the speed of light for it to work which would essentially be traveling through time.

I see. What if it was possible if that light (from the young Earth) could be reflected and sent back and people of let's say 50th century could see it.

 

[Benetanegia]

Come on guys we are talking about FTL travel defying or circumventing (warp drive, wormhole, etc.) the laws of physics and you're all nitpicking about the telescope*??

EDIT: And yeah I was talking about more like travelling 500 light years. Maybe even only travel ~50 light years and see who the fuck killed JFK. Both the shorter travel and required augmentation, are more realistic.

And TBH what real interest would really have to see the Earth billions of years ago? It' would be just a normal planet, in a normal star, We have trillions of such objects we can study from "home".

 

[Aquinus]

It would be awesome when future humans will travel for long distances. Then they could look back from some distant galaxy at young Earth and see how life formed.

Heisenberg would disagree with you.

The further away you travel from earth the less light that actually gets to you coming from our planet. There could come a point where you would be too far to see it, and honestly you don't have to get too far away from our solar system for that to happen. Earth is tiny in the grand scheme of things.

 

[Drone]

Heisenberg was a pessimist. There's gravitational lensing.

 

[Aquinus]

Heisenberg was a pessimist. There's gravitational lensing.

You can't focus light if it isn't any there. No kind of lense is going to help you here especially with how far away you have to go from the earth.

 

[Benetanegia]

You can't focus light if it isn't any there.

Light is there. Maybe too dim for current tech to extract any information from it. Maybe too dispersed. The fact that we can see galaxies 13.4 billion light years away from us says that, first light is there, and second that it can stay "focused" enough for us to see.

No kind of lense...

A massive cloud of nanoreceptors in space each capable of detecting light intensity down to a single photon or neutrino and capable of "recording" their momentum (the loss of position info is irrelevant, position is roughly that of the receptor). Info passed to a "computer" capable of interpreting that info, determining the procedence of particles based on momentum and nearby objects (starts, galaxies, etc) that might have influenced are processed and recognized and taken into account too. And finally constructing an "aproximate" image. Aproximate and vague in subatomic level, but since resolution is down to subatomic level, the accuracy of each "pixel" becomes irrelevant, the overall picture is accurate to our eyes.

 

[3870x2]

The distance isn't what has my neurons firing it's the fact that we found this early galaxy to observe! It really is an amazing time we are living in right now; our technology is allowing us look/probe farther/deeper into the cosmos allowing us to constantly be learning about our origins. They said the 18th century was the "Age of enlightenment" but i beg to differ, it was merely the begining of the separation of church/state which allowed us to reach the point we are at today; The REAL "Age of Enlightenment"

We aren't here because of some super all knowing, omnipotent being who is self righteous/conceded and wanted to clone himself/herself for amusement....

I can't wait untill they finally start using the plasma rockets on space craft

http://phys.org/news174031552.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket

Its conceited, and some of us here at TPU are Christians, and science freaks.

Atheists aren't the only people that are happy about the separation of church and state.

It's just awesome when you try to comprehend it.. Science can allow us to see things over 10 billion LIGHT YEARS away.... eesh..
I can't even see my house from my job...

With the equivalent hubble telescope at your house, you still wouldn't be able to see your house from your job. Going by this logic your house must be very far away

Lol yeah but I was only 50% serious about that. Let's say we travel 50 000 light years away and look back. How strong a telescope has to be to see what's happening on Earth's surface. How far could we zoom in

You would have to be travelling faster than the speed of light to be able to see light from the earth in the past, it isn't just a matter of travelling x distance. This could be alleviated by warping (folding space-time) which has recently been revisited due to some amazing discoveries.

I have a feeling you know all of this already.

 

[Drone]

You would have to be travelling faster than the speed of light to be able to see light from the earth in the past, it isn't just a matter of travelling x distance.
I have a feeling you know all of this already.

Yes I do know that. I was thinking about wormholes because space and time are related. But the universe is a strange thing even if it's 13.7 billion years old, there's something beyond that point because the diameter of the universe is much bigger than 13.7.

 

[3870x2]

Yes I do know that. I was thinking about wormholes because space and time are related. But the universe is a strange thing even if it's 13.7 billion years old, there's something beyond that point because the diameter of the universe is much bigger than 13.7.

BTW I love your enthusiasm in this sub-forum, keep up the amazing threads!

 

[Drone]

Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF)

This image, called XDF, combines Hubble observations taken over the past decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax.

It is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. It allows us to explore further back in time than ever before.

The image covers an area less than a tenth of the width of the full Moon, making it just a 30 millionth of the whole sky. Yet even in this tiny fraction of the sky, the long exposure (over one million seconds) reveals about 5500 galaxies, some of them so distant that we see them when the Universe was less than 5% of its current age. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness that the unaided human eye can see.

That's so impressive! It's amazing how the Universe is truly changing as it ages.

The Universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The early Universe was a time of dramatic birth for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars far brighter than our Sun. The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a time tunnel into the distant past when the Universe was just a fraction of its current age. The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the Universe's birth in the Big Bang.

Fascinating. Astronomers plan to push the XDF even deeper, into a time when the first stars and galaxies formed and filled the early "dark ages" of the Universe with light. Good luck to them

http://phys.org/news/2012-09-hubble-extreme-deepest-view-universe.html

 

[xBruce88x]

Its conceited, and some of us here at TPU are Christians, and science freaks.

Atheists aren't the only people that are happy about the separation of church and state.



With the equivalent hubble telescope at your house, you still wouldn't be able to see your house from your job. Going by this logic your house must be very far away



You would have to be travelling faster than the speed of light to be able to see light from the earth in the past, it isn't just a matter of travelling x distance. This could be alleviated by warping (folding space-time) which has recently been revisited due to some amazing discoveries.

I have a feeling you know all of this already.

There's still one more thing to consider... earth's location "x" amount of years ago when you go to look back at it... since earth is always moving it won't be "here" when you go to look back at it "x" lightyears away, you'd have to figure out where the old earth would be at in the past.

this brings up an interesting theory (well i just thought of it)... if we could accurately pinpoint earth's exact location say... 50 light years away (and therefore 50years) ago, would it be possible to aim the telescope at that exact spot and see our old reflection if you will...

 

[largon]

If we found a way to travel that 50 LYs in less than 50 years (let alone several millenia) I'd reckon we'd have more interesting things to do than building a telescope to look back at Earth only to see ourselves of the past pondering on how to travel to that spot 50 LYs away...