Mankind may continue to be grounded to planet Earth for decades, and stuck in this solar system for centuries, but that doesn’t stop scientists from looking at galaxies that are 13.4 billion light years away. This is officially the furthest mankind has seen up to this point, even if the galaxy that they found there shows up as nothing more than a red blotch on a screen.
The whole concept of looking at different galaxies is a little mind-bending to begin with. Whenever scientists peer through telescopes such as Hubble, that is capable of rendering images of extremely distant objects, they are not just looking incredibly far. They are also looking into the past. Every object that is visible through a telescope either produces or reflects light, making us capable of seeing it in the first place. For the light to be seen by human eyes, it has to travel for millions, even billions of years in order to reach the Earth.
That’s why the galaxy that astronomers have found on Thursday is a great reason for excitement. When the researchers realized that the light emitted by galaxy GN-Z11 had travelled for approximately 13.4 billion years to be able to be seen by us, they also had the epiphany that they were actually looking at a very distant age of the universe.
More specifically, they were looking at our universe as it was in its infancy. 400 million years old or 400 million years after the Big Bang to be exact. Or in other words, 3 percent of its current age.
So on the cosmic scale, practically newborn.
But the first question that arises in our heads, of course, is ‘how’ scientists managed to figure out just how far into the past they had peered? The answer lies in a very basic concept that astronomers have used to detect large space object movement such as stars and galaxies orbits for decades. It is called redshift and is regards the light that is emitted from said objects. When they move closer to the observation point, objects tend to glow blue; when they move away, objects tend to glow red.
Naturally, with the expansion of the universe, the GN-Z11 galaxy has a very distinctive red glow. And because it displays an extremely high rate of star formation, it is bright enough to spot; even from 13.4 billion years in the future. Scientists have detected that it grows nearly 20 times faster than our own Milky Way.
This galaxy sighting has resulted in a world record. Scientists believe that the oldest galaxies formed somewhere nearly 200 million years after the Big Bang. What is next? Will there be a day when we witness the very creation of our universe as we know it?
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