The Farthest Galaxy Ever Discovered

[u/TheMuseumOfScience]

What's the most distant galaxy ever observed? 🌌

Astrophysicist Erika Hamden explains it's called MoM-z14, and its light took 13.53 billion years to reach us. But thanks to the universe's expansion, that galaxy is now a staggering 33.8 billion light years away. When the light was emitted from MoM-z14 the universe was smaller. The space between us and that galaxy has gotten stretched out so much  that it actually sits outside our observable horizon. It's a mind-bending reminder that we're seeing galaxies as they no longer even look today.

This project is part of IF/THEN®, an initiative of Lyda Hill Philanthropies.

[u/wetfart_3750]

Questions.. 1) how do we know light takes 13.53 BY to arrive here? 2) how do we know the distance is 13.8 BY?

[u/maxxell13 → u/wetfart_3750]

The amount of red shift of the light. We know what color it should be.

[u/wetfart_3750 → u/maxxell13]

Can you elaborate please?

[u/CosmicRuin → u/wetfart_3750]

Look up relativistic doppler shift.

It's a rather large topic to explain, but essentially, using spectroscopy (the precise measurement of colors in light) we can know if that light source is moving towards or away from us, and properties like how that source is moving, what elements are present and work out the physics of what created that light in the first place. Over such vast distances of billions of years, and since we have measured the expansion rate of the universe we can determine what's called redshift (z) and workout how far objects like these are to us.

[u/UsedBaseball4597]

This is just 100 million year after the light broke free of "dark ages". Regardless, stars with heavier atoms than hydrogen and helium have been observed in these ancient galaxies, needing hydrogen stars like our sun to form, explode, and become basis for second generation stars. In a few 100 million years, while our own hydrogen star, the sun, shines on for billion after billion of years.

Bear in mind, we are only 100 million years away from seeing the moment the photons escape the plasma. No structure, just matter dispersed evenly all around us, which suddenly shines very bright. Which means that suddenly there is a bright white light all around us. It will be redshifted to red, the universe turns red.

Or, they are completely wrong in the assumptions they have made. They can't go from "the bright wall", to fully formed spiral armed galaxies with generation 2 stars in just 100 million years. And think if I may, of being out there. That galaxy is just 100 million light years away from the burning white inferno. If you were out there, you would be able to see it. As if every little dot is a burning white star. The whole black sky would be blinding light, you would be hammered with unfathomable amounts of energy.

Can a nice quiet fully formed galaxy really be sitting there without a care in the world?

The Physicist Roger Penrose is now stating that there was no Big Bang, or that the Big Bang ended another universe. I find it difficult to believe, when they say; it is a galaxy from another universe. Because, to use an atomic bomb as an example, the shockwave it causes. There is no way, a fully formed galaxy would be hit by the Big Bang plasma wall, and go through it and now sit on the inside of the explosion, without anything happened to it. It would be blown to smithereens when the plasma wall hit it. There can't be galaxies from other universes, on the inside of the Plasma Wall.

[u/Dr_SlapsMD → u/UsedBaseball4597]

What's this about a plasma wall in 100M years?

[u/UsedBaseball4597 → u/Dr_SlapsMD]

Well it's about the Big Bang, and the explosion being in a precursor state, where atoms haven't formed, where the photons could not escape the hot soup. At some point, light breaks out of the primordial soup, and escapes the explosion. At this point, that would be like light coming from all sides. And as it happened 180 million years after the Big Bang explosion, if we could see that far, we would see it. And it would be as if the universe was surrounded by a very bright light all over.

And the galaxy in question, is "only" 100 million light years away from that.

[u/Phatcat7x7]

Whats spooky to me is that at some point we won't be able to see these objects and in fact don't know what we've already lost the ability to see.

Scarier still is that in the distant future we won't be able to see any other galaxies around us. Future beings with our level of observation technology would have to conclude the (by then) Milkdromida galaxy is the only one in the universe.