NASA announced today that the Hubble Space Telescope has visualized an object (a galaxy) 13.4 billion light years away. That mans, of course, that the light we see left the galaxy only a bit after the Big Bang. This is all more or less above my pay grade, but it’s still cool:
By pushing NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. This surprisingly bright infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major.
“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” explained principal investigator Pascal Oesch of Yale University. The team includes scientists from Yale University, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and the University of California.
Here’s a very short video zeroing in on GN-z11:
The announcement continues (it’s much longer than the excerpts I’ve given here):
Astronomers are closing in on the first galaxies that formed in the universe. The new Hubble observations take astronomers into a realm that was once thought to be only reachable with NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
This measurement provides strong evidence that some unusual and unexpectedly bright galaxies found earlier in Hubble images are really at extraordinary distances. Previously, the team had estimated GN-z11’s distance by determining its color through imaging with Hubble and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Now, for the first time for a galaxy at such an extreme distance, the team used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to precisely measure the distance to GN-z11 spectroscopically by splitting the light into its component colors.
. . . The results reveal surprising new clues about the nature of the very early universe. “It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon,” explained investigator Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
And a diagram explaining more: “Now, for the first time for a galaxy at such an extreme distance, the team used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to precisely measure the distance to GN-z11 spectroscopically by splitting the light into its component colors.”
OK, now I’m confused. Is there a cosmologist in the house?
My very limited understanding is that we inhabit a universe whose estimated distance to the limits of observability is on the order of 40-billion light years, whereas the 13.7 billion years figure concerns the age of the universe. (the discrepancy between time elapsed and distance from Earth being due to the expansion of space-time itself).
Just thought I’d attempt to clarify & give others a chance to rip me apart & smear me thin, like what would happen if I tried to approach a black hole.
You are essentially correct. The 13.4 billion years is how long light has taken to reach us, so the press release says that it “is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past”.
It will be much further away than 13.4 billion light years *now*, owing to the expansion of space since then.
Also, when the light was emitted the distance to earth would have been much less than 13.4 billion light years, since again the gap has expanded as the light was traveling.
And earth was not here to see it until 4.5 billion years ago and Hubble just saw it. So how far away is it now? GN-Z11
I am pretty sure that galaxy no longer exists. The early stars and galaxies burned their fuel very rapidly which led to the creation of heavier elements. Also, I understand that there are many galaxies that we will never be able to see because the expansion of the universe prevents their light from ever “catching up” to us.
For more information: How is the Universe bigger than its age?
Great stuff. Thank you both!
Very good. 46 Billion light years will be something else to think about.
I’m good friends with Ann Feild (the graphic artist who did the diagram), and although she does indeed have several cats, she is not a felid herself.
Some context on the right side of the image from Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll, on the Hot Big Bang and the question if the universe began:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgpvCxDL7q4&w=590&h=332%5D
Okay, I’m not sure about the embed policy and I forgot to check, so please remove if it is burdening the site.
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That is cool. But the record distance will be broken when the James Webb telescope goes up. I hope its a successful deployment, b/c that thing is going to be tricky.
Looking at the last diagram I had a weird thought, if we get a telescope powerful enough, could we see beyond the Big Bang & see the hand of god? 🙂 (sorry, being silly here).
We already see as far as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) routinely. If you have an analogue TV, you can see it for yourself amongst the noise generated by the hot and unstable electronics of the TV. I mention the noise because it’s significant. About 1% of the between stations signal you pick up is CMB, the rest is terrestrial and receiver noise.
The last half century of effort has gradually cleaned up the signal until we can see some slight variations in the CMB, at a level of a few parts per million of the signal (so a few parts per billion of your de-tuned TV signal). That is behind the occasional flurry of cosmological excitement over “seeing the imprint of other universes” and such like. (TLDR version – much talk, no consensus.)
Say we built a bigger telescope to look beyond the CMB. We’d see light that has been red-shifted even further into the radio spectrum (and so more affected by terrestrial noise), and the signals would be even smaller than the parts per billion (PPB) signal that we see already. And the “long tail” of the black body spectrum of the CMB would always be present too, with its PPB signals. So you’d be looking for unknown PPT (trillion) signals through the PPB noise of the CMB. And you’d be looking through the whole PPP (Parts Per Part) of terrestrial noise.
Tricky.
An analogy. Get a piece of fine thread which you can just feel. There’s your BEYOND CMB signal at PPT. Say it’s 1/100mm thick. Now, weave a net out of 10mm mountaineering rope (good stuff, really supple Bridon is good). Lay the net over the thread. There’s your CMB signal.
Now weave a pair of mittens out of rope for mooring supertanker with. That’s terrestrial radio noise.
Put the mittens on, and feel the fine thread through the mittens and under the rope net. Tricky?
One proposal is to put the telescope on the far (not “dark”) side of the Moon, to hide from a lot of the radio noise. “Cheap and easy” is not likely to figure in the plans. Nor is “soon”. But people are thinking about how to do it.
Brilliant stuff!! Thanks!
I second that.
Happy to help.