- Joined
- Sep 1, 2010
- Messages
- 7,023 (1.41/day)
We have a new distance record holder. It's the newly discovered galaxy, named MACS0647-JD, as it was 420 million years after the Big Bang. Its light has travelled for 13.3 billion years to reach Earth, which corresponds to a redshift of approximately 11.
Just think about that, the light has been on the road for billions of years.
Yeah, that tiny dot. It's a baby galaxy. Very tiny.
Tiny and young.
Thanks to gravitational lensing, otherwise they'd have never found it. I hope that James Webb Space Telescope (scheduled for launch in 2018) will shed more light on this
http://phys.org/news/2012-11-hubble-candidate-distant-universe.html
Just think about that, the light has been on the road for billions of years.
Yeah, that tiny dot. It's a baby galaxy. Very tiny.
The object is so small it may be in the first stages of galaxy formation, with analysis showing the galaxy is less than 600 ly across. For comparison the Milky Way is 150 000 ly across. The estimated mass of this baby galaxy is roughly equal to 100 million or a billion suns, or 0.1 - 1 % the mass of our Milky Way's stars.
Tiny and young.
Along the way, 8 billion years into its journey, the galaxy's light took a detour along multiple paths around the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0647.7+7015. Due to the gravitational lensing, the team observed three magnified images of MACS0647-JD with Hubble. The cluster's gravity boosted the light from the faraway galaxy, making the images appear far brighter than they otherwise would, although they still appear as tiny dots in Hubble's portrait.
Thanks to gravitational lensing, otherwise they'd have never found it. I hope that James Webb Space Telescope (scheduled for launch in 2018) will shed more light on this
http://phys.org/news/2012-11-hubble-candidate-distant-universe.html