Just a mere 13.14 billion light-years from Earth
By Clay Dillow Posted 05.27.2011 at 10:26 am 9 Comments

GRB 090429B See it? Gemini Observatory / AURA / Levan, Tanvir, Cucchiara

And just like that, we’ve got a new candidate for the most distant object in the universe. It was only in January that Hubble data showed that the space telescope had glimpsed a galaxy so distant that it appeared as it did when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. Now a gamma-ray burst first spotted by NASA’s Swift satellite in April of 2009 could potentially replace it as the most distant object ever seen.

GRB 090429B (the numbered name denotes its April 29, 2009, discovery) is estimated to be some 13.14 billion light years away from Earth. Given that the universe is only estimated to be about 13.7 billion years old, that makes the source of this light really young in a cosmic sense, originating when the universe was just 4 percent of its current age and 10 percent of its present size. It’s also way, way out there, further than any confirmed quasar or galaxy on the books.

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Technology, Clay Dillow, cosmology, gamma-ray bursts, gamma-rays, hubble, most distant object, Space, swift satellite
Apart from the potential distance record, that makes GRB 090429B extremely interesting from a cosmological standpoint. Whatever galaxy spawned this intense burst of gamma-rays would have to be one of the first galaxies in the universe. And though we can’t see that galaxy with our current observatories, future researchers will know exactly where to point their next-gen telescopes to get a glimpse this GRB’s progenitor.

In the meantime, additional analysis will have to be done to determine if GRB 090429B is indeed the most distant object ever seen in space. Pinpoint accuracy at such distances is understandably hard to come by, but multiple lines of evidence endorse this latest GRB as the current record-holder.

[Penn State Science]

9 Comments

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rstarkov
05/27/11 at 11:51 am

What you mean is that the light from that object took 13.14 billion light years to reach us.

In the meantime the universe has expanded so much that the object is actually roughly 45 billion light years away, in terms of the so-called comoving distance.

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Greg_NJ
05/27/11 at 2:40 pm

That's what they said, rstarkov.

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jmadrigal12
05/27/11 at 6:40 pm

If it is 13.14 billion light years from us in one direction, how is the universe only 13.7 old? What about the distance the light traveled in the opposite direction from earth? We aren't on the edge of the universe are we? If we can see 13.4 in that direction, wouldn't the universe be at least 27.4?

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jmadrigal12
05/27/11 at 6:53 pm

What effect would the expansion have on light itself? Besides changing the distance the light travels. Would the expansion change the wavelength over time, making it appear to be farther?

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Dav25557
05/28/11 at 8:00 am

Don't quote me on this jmadrigal12, but I think it has to do with the Doppler Effect. When the object moves away, the light still travels towards us at light speed, so the wavelength increases to allow that to happen. The objects that are farther away from us move away faster, so we use the amount of that change in wavelength to measure the distance. We have Hubble to thank for that.

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AdamB
05/30/11 at 10:37 am

@jmadrigal12, to answer your first question, as the galaxy is a light (or in this case, gamma ray) source, we don't need light reflecting off of it, like we do with a normal object on earth. And at that distance, light from us would be far to weak to make a return to use in any significant fashion as a reflection. So we are seeing the light that originated 13.14 billion years ago over there, not light that traveled from us to there and back.

The only reason we detected this faint signal was because it was originally a very, very powerful, energetic events, which has dissipated over distance & time.

For your other question, that is called 'red shift'. It will not make the object seem farther away, but it does change the wavelength/frequency of the light.

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CodeZero
05/31/11 at 12:23 pm

@AdamB, you are missing jmadrigal12's actual question, (s)he did not ask why 13.14 is used looking for light to travel from us, to the source and back. (s)he is asking, if the entirety of the known universe is 13.7 billion years old.. and this light is 13.14 years old, wouldn't that assumption that the universe is 13.7 billion years old assume that WE are at the dead center? and thus everything we see, when we measure distance and assume age, we have to be the center. Since we do not know our exact place in the universe spacially in reference to the starting point, it makes putting an age on this light source a random guess. It's like trying to figure out how long ago a ship set sail from a harbor, without knowing where you are, where the harbor is and going only off the distance between you and it. To get the proper age, you need to triangulate, which we can't do without a singular starting point for both us and it.

@jmadrigal12, I like your question about expansition causing an effect. A quite often forgotten fact is that everything is affected by temp. So the farther from the source this burst traveled, the slower it would travel. Thus making it seem much older than it is.

Light is NOT a constant speed, it is affected by tempurature AND Gravity and thus cannot and SHOULD NOT be used any longer as an accurate unit of measure.
It's like trying to measure a football field with an elastic band!

Playing Devil's Advocate since 1978

"The only constant in the universe is change"
-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC - 475 BC

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drchuck1
06/01/11 at 2:04 pm

everyone please ignore CodeZero's remarks, as usual he is making up his own personal laws of physics, light speed is a constant, acording to Einstein and every astrophysicist, i don't pretend to understand how all this stuff works but the estimate of 13.7 billion years old is universally excepted, contrary to the codezero calculator

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CodeZero
06/05/11 at 10:16 am

Sorry drchuck1, but again you have put your foot in your mouth.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/light.html
they slowed a beam of light down to 38 miles an hour, and that was 12 years ago....
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/10/991005114024.htm

Read up a little... then come back and say that light isn't temp sensitive.

Playing Devil's Advocate since 1978

"The only constant in the universe is change"
-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC - 475 BC



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