By Clay Dillow Posted 06.14.2012 at 12:30 pm 10 Comments

Galaxy SXDF-NB1006-2 Likely among the first in existence. NAOJ

The telescopes get bigger and more sophisticated, the light we can see comes in from deeper in the cosmos, and the most-distant visible objects keep getting further away. Last October astronomers using Hubble Space Telescope data reported sighting a possible galaxy some 13.2 billion light years away. That sighting is still awaiting confirmation as a galaxy, and in the meantime it has some competition in a galaxy discovered by scientists at the Subaru and Keck Telescopes that has, for the time being, seized the title of most distant known galaxy.

At some 12.91 billion light-years out, galaxy SXDF-NB1006-2 could at some point be eclipsed by the Hubble finding. But for now it edges out galaxy GN-108036 for the title, a faraway star system also discovered by the Subaru telescope that is ever-so-slightly closer to Earth.

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Technology, Clay Dillow, hubble space telescope, keck observatory, most distant galaxy, Space, subaru telescope
To capture the image of such a distant object, the telescopes had to gather light for 37 hours, allowing it to accumulate on the telescopic sensors. Astronomers then had to strip out two potential galaxies from nearly 59,000 other objects to zero in on their most distant galaxy candidate. Additional observations with spectroscopic instruments confirmed that SXDF-NB1006-2 is indeed the most distant galactic body on the books.

That puts its minimum age around 12.9 billion years, meaning it was around just 800 million years after the Big Bang birthed the universe as we know it into existence 13.7 billion years back. Astronomers search for these distant objects hoping to learn more about the universe’s earliest days.

[SPACE]

10 Comments

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lawsonrw
06/14/12 at 1:15 pm

I wonder what treasures are to be found on a planet that's had 13 Billion years for its geology to mature... for civilizations to rise and fall, and life to evolve.

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Robot
06/14/12 at 1:39 pm

Perhaps they or some probe they sent out into the heavens landed itself on Earth to start life for all of us.

Perhaps they sent out cosmic ship and orbited and landed some 10 thousand years ago or longer on Earth. Tweak with the human DNA and created a working intelligent human raise that served them for a spell. During this time, they educated the humans in language, math, stars, and calendars and gave humans our moral foundation. Once they gathered enough Earth recourses, they ventured on, back into space.

To boldly go, where no remote founding planet from the oldest cosmic source, has gone before...

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lawsonrw
06/14/12 at 2:36 pm

Nice...

But going 13 BILLION LY is a very long way. The mode of travel is highly theoretical in nature by our technology...

BTW, I always have a problem with the notion that some alien race came here to teach us about civilization. Who taught them? Some older alien race? And who taught that alien race? See where I'm going?

Same thing goes with the idea that we came from somewhere else...

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Robot
06/14/12 at 2:55 pm

lawsonrw,
I think we humans are very much a part of our Earthly environment and evolution too. I can also acknowledge spontaneous changes can happen to life on Earth as well. Finally, I also concede to the possibility that some tweaking to us humans from an outside source is possible to help leap the evolution trend as well. I think all of it can be true at the same time. The amount of time the cosmos has been around and the amount of time the Earth has been around is immense.

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purfus
06/14/12 at 3:16 pm

Perhaps they evolved and died on their planet in their little solar system until their star ran out of juice. All the while glancing into the heavens at the great light coming from what they theorized is the center of the universe hoping travel to other worlds some day.

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websterphreaky
06/14/12 at 3:45 pm

You People are DELUSIONAL!! Probes from 13 BILLION LIGHT YEARS (do you even KNOW how long that is!!?), Treasures, seeded Earth ..... you're as nuts as the Retards that call George Snoory and his LIARS CLUB radio show - Coast to Ghost AM. Get a Life and some Education in Science, not the Delusions you live in.

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BoronMoron
06/14/12 at 5:03 pm

Don't sell people short webster. I think the earth was 'seeded' by chemical diversity. To define life we must look at systems of independent parts that make up a cell. Take ribosomes for example. Are they alive? They are a functioning unit within a cell, but they too must perform defined criteria. Amino acids are like legos, get enough of them working and they will build the house. ... Somehow

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Robot
06/14/12 at 6:30 pm

Consider this, a star system 12.9 Billion Light Years Away is the new most distant galazy. Distance is calculated from us, not from the cosmos center. Science does not know exactly where the cosmos center is, so in fact this star sytem that is 12.9 billion years from us and we being 4.7 bilion years old Earth, could infact be much older, if we only knew where the cosmos center began.

The age of the Earth is based upon radioactive decay. So how old is the space of nothingness, prior to the Earth beign formed in the first place. For all we know, that location void nothingness in space could be 1000s of billions of years old comparied to the cosmic center. How do you messure nothing, but the location of a certain spot in space to another spot in space, of which we do not know its exact location and its beginning too?

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Ebrainer1
06/14/12 at 7:07 pm

Actually, when one considers that it's light from 13 billion years ago that we're seeing, there's no certainty that the galaxy is even there anymore. Sorry to burst the bubble of the conspiracy theorists.

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Charybdis
06/25/12 at 3:26 pm

If the light started 13 billion years ago, was the universe 13 billion light years across already, and did it expand further out for another 13 billion years after the light began? How does that fit with the supposed age of the universe at around 14.5 billion years old? If we look in the other direction can we see something almost as far away?



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