Researchers recently found the farthest-ever galaxy, a Hubble smudge at a distance of around 13 billion light years.
But when light travels a long time through an expanding universe, it introduces several bizarre twists.
In our own neighborhood, light from a Virgo-cluster galaxy 50 million light-years away takes that long to get here, which is short compared with its age of nine billion years. So we’re essentially seeing a current accurate snapshot.
But the speed of the expanding universe increases with distance, so weird stuff happens to truly far-away objects. We can say that that newly found far-off galaxy is old because we see it as it was when its light started traveling to us 13 billion years ago. Its image is ancient. We can also say it’s young because the image itself shows us a newborn galaxy, since all galaxies were babies back then.
On top of that, when the image we’re now seeing left that galaxy, we were much closer to it because the universe was much smaller. It was half its current size and twice its current temperature around seven billion years ago. So its image should logically look larger than we’d expect for such a faraway galaxy. A photograph’s dimensions don’t change just because it took a long time to get delivered.
And, yes, that galaxy does look strangely big.
But it’s also far dimmer than we’d expect. Space has been stretching all the time its image traveled, dramatically weakening it. It’s now superfaint — as if it were at the impossible distance of 260 billion light-years.
Let’s put all this together. It’s the oldest galaxy image we’ve ever seen, making it also the youngest. It looks way too big for its distance, but also way too faint. Could things get any weirder?
You bet. Science articles say it’s 13 billion light-years from here, but that’s merely how long its light took to reach us. During all that time, the galaxy has meanwhile been madly rushing away at very nearly light-speed. It’s now actually 30 billion light-years away, nearly at the edge of the observable universe.
But objects do not end there. Most galaxies were never positioned for their light to be able to arrive here at all. At least 98% of the universe lies “over the horizon” in a zone that can never be observed. And where does THAT end? No one knows, but given all the modern parameters, it’s likely the universe is, was, and always will be infinite in extent. If so, since any fraction of infinity is zero, it’s not wrong to assume that everything we see through our best telescopes represent zero percent of the universe.
Long ago, wise people shrugged and mused, “What do we really know? Actually, nothing.” Now there’s a solid astrophysics basis for believing it. Happily, if such humility facilitates a logical “giving up” which morphs into a different realm of consciousness, one in which reality is perceived accurately, meaning directly instead of symbolically (and yes, that’s what really happens), maybe that’s not a bad thing at all. Perhaps this farthest-ever ‘city of suns’ came bearing gifts.
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