Tuesday, October 26, 2010

New cosmic distance record-holder

A tiny galaxy from the depths of cosmic space and time has become the most distant astronomical object known. At a distance of 13.071 billion light-years, the galaxy is so remote that the light now reaching Earth left the starlit body less than 600 million years after the Big Bang.


Yep, that tiny little dot in the red circle is the oldest and most distant astronomical object discovered.  

16 hours of observations with the spectrograph allowed the scientists to measure the galaxy’s redshift — the extent to which light emitted by a body is shifted to longer, or redder, wavelengths by the expansion of the universe. The more distant a body, the greater its redshift. UDFy-38135539 has a redshift of 8.56, beating the previous distance holder, a powerful cosmic explosion known as a gamma-ray burst, by about 35 million light-years.

7 comments:

  1. Yeah, I heard about that. :D Pretty awesome!

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  2. niiice.

    but what about those other dots?? D:

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  3. Awwww, I wish I could teleport to any part of the galaxy....

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  4. everything over there is dead haha ;)
    keep up the good work bro

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  5. One shift. Two shift. Red shift. Blue shift.

    I am sure there's a book deal in that someplace.

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  6. mind-shattering in scale. really humbles you.

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