found this article on NASA’s website; it’s called NASA's Hubble Finds Most Distant Galaxy Candidate Ever Seen in Universe. What it’s about is the Hubble Space Telescope found a galaxy 13.2 billion light years away. The universe is only 13.7 billion years old, which means this galaxy was created about 480 million years after the Big Bang. It broke the last record of oldest galaxy by about 150 million years. What they found is a mini galaxy which is to small to take a spiral shape. The individual stars are too hard to make out but evidence suggests that it is made up of really hot stars created more than 100 million years earlier from gas trapped in a pocket of dark matter. The deep field picture that they found it in was taken in May of 2009, and took over a year to identify. It came up as an extremely small inferred dot.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
13.2 Billion Light Years Away
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Heh. I have this exact current event. Thanks for stealing it...kidding. I think the coolest thing about it is how far back it was, and how much we can take from that. I mean, this was really close to the time when the universe became opaque! WAY early. I wonder if they know how the galaxy got warped out of time, or if it is...the structure of this galaxy would tell us a lot about the early years of the universe!
ReplyDeleteThis is insane! Who would of thought that there is a galaxy that is so far away? It makes me wonder how many of those galaxies are out there that are actually this far away. I also agree with the person above that this could help us find some very cool things about the begginings of time because of how it is built up! Cool!
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