Awesome
Lol! Just realized I screwed up in my initial comment in post one. I wrote the ancient galaxy was *11* light-years way, as opposed to 11 *billion* light-years.
However, at the end of the comment I did say billion.
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Post 1
“Because light travels at a finite speed, the light from A1689B11 left that galaxy 11 billion years ago”
That is, it’s ‘11 light-years away’, where ONE light-year, the *distance* light travels in a year at its fixed speed of 186,000 miles per second, works out to about 5.9 TRILLION miles. And so this ancient galaxy is 5.9 trillion x 11 billion miles away. So if you plan on visiting, pack a few extra sandwiches.
Something interesting that I would like to point out is that, as most of you may know, as light from such remote sources travels through space to us, due to universal expansion, it stretches out to longer wavelengths. ie, it is “red shifted”.
And in a case like this, an object 11 billion light-years distant, the shift is comparatively large. In other words, for us to receive these images in the near infrared today, the light must have started out at a shorter wavelength, quite possibly within the visible/optical range.
An even more interesting thing, IMO, would be in the case where light from a somewhat less distant source is received in the visible/optical range (less red-shifted), meaning it possibly started out in the ultra-violet UV range.
So we would then be ‘seeing’ something with our own eye from the UV part of the EM spectrum.
Non-visible/optical images (infrared, UV, gamma, microwave, radio, etc) are typically converted to false color images in order that there is something for people to see and study.