This image from the Hubble Space Telescope CANDELS survey highlights the most distant galaxy in the universe with a measured distance, dubbed z8_GND_5296. The galaxy's red color alerted astronomers that it was likely extremely far away and, thus, seen at an early time after the Big Bang. A team of astronomers including Steven Finkelstein of the University of Texas at Austin and Vithal Tilvi of Texas A&M University measured the exact distance using the Keck I telescope with the new MOSFIRE spectrograph. They found that this galaxy is seen at about 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just 5% of its current age of 13.8 billion years. Credit: V. Tilvi, Texas A&M University; S.L. Finkelstein, University of Texas at Austin; C. Papovich, Texas A&M University; CANDELS Team and Hubble Space Telescope/NASA
This is an artist's rendition of the newly discovered most distant galaxy z8_GND_5296. (The galaxy looks red in the actual Hubble Space Telescope image because the collective blue light from stars get shifted toward redder colors due to the expansion of the universe and its large distance from Earth.) Credit: V. Tilvi, S.L. Finkelstein, C. Papovich, NASA, ESA, A. Aloisi, The Hubble Heritage, HST, STScI, and AURA.
Space ping!..........
I tried to imagine how big the universe is one night waiting for sleep. I got close and had a kind of panic attack for my efforts.
It's so far away it's almost to the outer boundary of the neighboring universe. Think of our known universe as a bubble in soap. How many other bubbles are there?
Imagine if you could grow yourself so large that our known universe was the size of a grain of sand ... and then postulate what you might see from that viewpoint.
Then imagine how fast you could travel from one end of the universe to the other.
Until next year, or next month, when they discover a galaxy even further away.
And then another, the following year.
Etc.
And it’s amazing how many other galaxies are visible in that one image from Hubble.
Very interesting, but...the prevalence of G2 stars would have required heavy element burning in at least one or two earlier generations of larger stars, which would have required at least a few billion years including supernova production, element spreading and subsequent accretion. I’m a little fuzzy about how this then young galaxy could produce so many G2s.
“30 billion light years away. “
I thought the Universe was only 14 billion years old.
When we look at something 13 billion light years away we are seeing it as it was 13 billion years ago. So why is it so far? I thought the universe was expanding. So why isn’t it closer?
You forgot to add the proper qualifier to this headline: Universe's most distant galaxy discovered [until the next 'most distant' galaxy is discovered]
They will find another one that is even further out within a year... count on it....
While fascinating, it prolly doesn’t even there anymore. :-)
I’ve never seen one of the green boxes in the night sky before. Cool.
Maybe they are "Dark Galaxies."