Oldest Spiral Galaxy Ever Seen May Reveal Secrets About the Milky Way

Space.Com ^ | November 07, 2017 | Calla Cofield, Space.com Senior Writer

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Cosmology and astronomy are simply fascinating!

And intimately related to the material of which we are made.

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Definitely

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That’s how far away it was 11 billion years ago.

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That’s how far away it was 11 billion years ago.

Even that may not be entirely true. After all, the rate of the expansion over the course of 11 billion years has supposedly changed a few times. First there was the "Inflation" period, where the rate was many times faster than light. Then, sometime after that, the rate apparently slowed considerably, then started speeding up again to be where it's supposedly at today, accelerating.

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From an earlier post...

“Astronomers (and other people) are not always very clear about what they mean when they talk about an object’s “distance”, leading to a lot of confusion about this topic. Read on for a further explanation.

First of all, the expansion of the universe doesn’t consist of galaxies moving through some static space, but rather the “stretching” of the space itself.

The light is moving through this expanding space and has to travel the initial distance plus whatever distance is added due to the universe’s expansion during the course of the journey.

It’s like running on a racetrack that is being stretched — if the racetrack started off 100 meters long but got stretched to a final length of 400 meters as you were running from start to finish, then the total distance you’ve run is more than 100 meters.

In fact, when you talk about the “distance” between the start and finish lines in this racetrack, you might mean several different things:

(1) You could mean 100 meters, since that’s the distance when you start running; it’s also what the markings on the track say the distance is.

(2) You could mean 400 meters, since that’s the distance between start and finish at the moment you reach the finish line.

(3) You could mean the actual distance you’ve run, which is more than 100 meters (since the track stretches while you’re running on it), but less than 400 meters (since some of the stretching happens on parts of the track you’ve already passed through).”