Posted on 12/29/2020 5:23:33 AM PST by Red Badger
A team of astronomers, led by the University of Tokyo, Japan, used the Keck I telescope to measure the distance to the oldest galaxy in the Universe, which is located at the boundary of the observable Universe.
The team hopes that their research on the oldest galaxy in the Universe, GN-z11, can shed light on a period of cosmological history when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old.
Professor Nobunari Kashikawa from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo said: “From previous studies, the galaxy GN-z11 seems to be the farthest detectable galaxy from us, at 13.4 billion light years, or 134 nonillion kilometers (that’s 134 followed by 30 zeros),” said Kashikawa. “But measuring and verifying such a distance is not an easy task.”
Kashikawa and his team measured what’s known as the redshift of GN-z11, which refers to the way light stretches out, and becomes redder, the farther it travels. Certain chemical signatures, called emission lines, imprint distinct patterns in the light from distant objects. By measuring how stretched these signatures are, astronomers can deduce how far the light must have travelled, thus giving indicating the distance from the target galaxy.
Kashikawa added: “We looked at ultraviolet light specifically, as that is the area of the electromagnetic spectrum, we expected to find the redshifted chemical signatures. The Hubble Space Telescope detected the signature multiple times in the spectrum of GN-z11. However, even the Hubble cannot resolve ultraviolet emission lines to the degree we needed. So, we turned to a more up-to-date ground-based spectrograph, an instrument to measure emission lines, called MOSFIRE, which is mounted to the Keck I telescope in Hawaii.”
The MOSFIRE captured the emission lines from GN-z11 in detail, which allowed the team to make an estimation on its distance than was possible from previous data. When working with distances at these scales, astronomers use a value known as the redshift number denoted by z. Kashikawa and his team improved the accuracy of the galaxy’s z value by a factor of 100. If subsequent observations can confirm this, then the astronomers can confidently say GN-z11 is the farthest galaxy ever detected in the Universe.
LMAO! at your DUH! Are they that stupid? Sorry, yes they are.
Maybe they’re looking back at us and think we’re the oldest.
They would be 14+ Billion years ahead of us, so we’d be like a microbe under a microscope to them.............
Wow! this means that the earth is the center of the universe. My how lucky we are.
...but, ..that’s our galaxy, ....there’s a giant mirror between us!!!
(Oops, there is a smudge on the telescope lens.)
We were not here 13 billion years ago so no they aren’t.
You mean light from the thing furthest away from us, taking the longest time to reach us, might be the oldest thing?
Well, its he oldest thing we can see....
That is how the whole traveling at the speed of light thing works.
Must be full of retirement homes and shuffleboard courts.
And Golf Carts powered by Dilithium Crystals..............
If this is looking “back in time,” then the galaxy should appear CLOSE to us, closer in time to the “big bang”. But it appears FAR away. ‘Splain please.
Think of a DEFLATED BALLOON, flat laying on the table.
You draw a dot one side and label it ‘Earth Milky Way’.
You draw a dot on the other side and label it ‘GN-z11’.
The two dots are essentially ‘next to each other’.
You inflate the balloon. This represents the Big Bang and space ‘expanding’.
As you blow up the balloon, the two dots get farther and farther apart.
Where they originated, the Big Bang locus, is in the middle.
We are not necessarily on the opposite edge of the Universe from GN-z11.
We are somewhere in the region between where the Big Bang happened and the edge of the Universe as we can see it................
They get paid by the observation, noone said it had to be a report focused on an IQ level of the reader, do they thought that just saying some dumb obvious thing to get paid would not be noticed by those with more IQ than a jelly baby.
They cannot explain that, nor can they explain why the southern hemisphere stars are in no way in the same place they were for the past 50 years. Or why the world’s largest radio telescope, with millions spent on maintenance cwas in under 5 days reported and shown self destructing.
Just questions we don’t ask I suppose.
I’d say it’s past the observable edge, but then what do I know?
The problem is that the farthest away objects are so ‘red shifted’ that they lose visual observability and move into the infra-red part of the spectrum................
What is beyond that point?
Maybe the back of our heads looking at the universe.
I have made that observation.
If the Universe is a huge, ever expanding sphere, then we should be able to see the same things that are going away in one direction, red shifted, coming at us in the opposite direction, blue shifted.................
I thought time was relative.
Only when your family is over for Christmas.
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