Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
RECENT POSTS
- Mars Rover: Stuck in the Mud
- Tranquility Base
- NASA's Ares 1-X Test: The View From Above
- The Yes Men
- The Missing Link -- Not
- Moon Crash Kicked Up Plume After All
- Moon Crash: Where's the Water?
- Green Apple: Firm is Latest to Leave U.S. Chamber of Commerce
- Recovery.gov: Your Tax Dollars at Work
- Climate: Power Companies Quit U.S Chamber of Commerce
MONTHLY ARCHIVES
« Previous | Main | Next »
The Most Distant Light in the Universe?
April 28, 2009 2:37 PM
The little smudge in the telescope images may be the most distant object ever seen -- a dying star, exploding in what astrophysicists call a gamma-ray burst, 13.065 billion light-years from Earth.
Since the Big Bang is currently estimated to have taken place 13.7 billion years ago, the explosion happened when the universe was very young -- five percent as old as it is now. The explosion was spotted by several telescopes at 3:55 a.m. EDT on April 23. The light literally came to us from somewhere near the edge of space.
The image above came from the Gemini observatory in Hawaii. The one below is combined from several sensors on board NASA's Swift orbiting telescope, designed specifically to look for these most spectacular of cosmic events.
"We're seeing the demise of a star -- and probably the birth of a black hole -- in one of the universe's earliest stellar generations," said Derek Fox of Penn State University.
A light-year is a little less than six trillion miles. Do some math, and if the explosion was 13 billion light-years away, it was about 76,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles off.
“This makes it easily the most distant object ever seen by humanity,” said Edo Berger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The European Southern Observatory, which detected the explosion too, agreed.
NASA scientists think other objects, imaged by the Hubble telescope, may have been farther away -- but they weren't seen just as they exploded.
The explosion was of "modest brightness," said astrophysicists, and lasted only about ten seconds. But it was violent beyond description. Scientists say gamma-ray bursts, which happen when stars run out of fuel for the nuclear fusion that powers them, are the "most powerful events in the universe," in the words of Britain's Science and Technology Council, destroying everything around them for light-years around them.
For now, the new find is only known by the name GRB 090423. Poetic alternatives welcomed.
April 28, 2009 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (70)
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.
Let's see - nothing travels faster than light. If that's true, how did we get here before that light did? Also, if nothing travels faster than light, that's what we should build spaceships out of - nothing.
Posted by: andyr | Apr 28, 2009 4:42:43 PM
With no disrespect to the great minds in astrophysics, The Vedas state that the universe has a definite circumference and coverings of the same elements within it (begginning with earth, water, fire, air and ether, that's why it's dark, like the inside of a basketball. There are billions of universes floating like bubbles in a great cosmic ocean. This concept of billions of "light years" is questionable.
Posted by: Gerald | Apr 28, 2009 4:47:31 PM
This stuff is so cool. It is amazing what we don't know.
Posted by: Huh | Apr 28, 2009 5:45:32 PM
I think we should time warp to that thing thru a worm hole. Shouldn't take mor than an hour or so.
Posted by: Lex | Apr 28, 2009 5:47:06 PM
Can some math geek comment on this? If this is 13bbn light-years away and we are seeing it now, then it blew up 13bbn years ago. So that means that in 0.7 bbn years it lived, died, and it and us moved far enough away from each other so that it took the rest of the time for that light to reach us? Just how fast was/is everything moving? Does the math work?
Posted by: Andy | Apr 28, 2009 5:52:45 PM
If space is curved (Einstein proved it), then maybe we're actually looking back at ourselves billions and billions and billions of light years ago.
Posted by: Peter Searle | Apr 28, 2009 5:54:37 PM
Correction: the time we've been moving apart would not be .7 bbn years, but 13.7, but light has been moving as well for those 13 bbn years.
Posted by: Andy | Apr 28, 2009 5:55:40 PM
I wonder sometimes how the people who claim the universe is about 6000 years old because the bible says so explain things like light that took billions of years to get here. I'm sure I don't want to know the answer, because I'm sure it will make me angry.
Posted by: GreggW | Apr 28, 2009 5:59:28 PM
Andy, you've got the only intelligent post in the list. . .
Look up hyperinflation for your (theoretical) answer.
Posted by: Erik | Apr 28, 2009 6:04:49 PM
I wonder if the galaxy is much older than they believe...
If the light if this is explosion is just now arriving to earth(meaning it happened 13 Billion years ago) then if there are object farther away, we won't even know they exist because they behind the veil of time.
I watched a documentary on the gamma burst mentioned in the article. Those things are deadly events; wiping out all or a sizable chunk of the galaxy it happened in. If one occured in the milky way galaxy...life on earth would be obliterated in an instant... very scary ,and even more so when there's nothing we can do about it.
Posted by: Wolf | Apr 28, 2009 6:05:49 PM
I have that same kind of question Andy.
Some of the basic math doesn't add up.
Posted by: amer_icon | Apr 28, 2009 6:06:51 PM
God must have a lot of children!!! Christ is probably not God's only child.
Posted by: Tom NYC | Apr 28, 2009 6:07:37 PM
This is so interesting, I would like to have a conversation with anyone about this event! .
Posted by: trailmixx | Apr 28, 2009 6:07:39 PM
Is this right? 76 sextillion, four hundred quintillion miles? I tried to figure it out. "Since the universe itself is believed to be 13.7 years old", usually I don't nitpick, but um what should that really be? Anyway, that's really far out.
Posted by: BridgetoSomewhere | Apr 28, 2009 6:14:35 PM
Andy
Interesting question. I think we can only say that there are 13 billion light years between where the object was THEN (when the light left) and where we are NOW (when we finally detect the light). Where the two endpoints were traveling before and after that event shouldn't affect the calculation.
I was going to say that astronomers could maybe calculate where we were THEN, but of course our solar syatem didn't exist then.
Definitely mind-bending.
Posted by: jock59801 | Apr 28, 2009 6:15:29 PM
"Let's see - nothing travels faster than light. If that's true, how did we get here before that light did?"
The expansion of the universe doesn't occur at the 'edge' of the universe, but everything within the universe (the whole universe) is expanding. In Einstein’s parlance - the speed of light is the speed limit within space-time, however space-time itself is expanding. Therefore for this reason many objects in the universe will be moving relative to the Earth faster than the speed of light. Some of these objects might never be visible from the Earth because their light may never reach us.
Posted by: SDR | Apr 28, 2009 6:21:01 PM
76 sextillion, 4 hundred quintillion; not quadrillion. Quadrillion is lower that quintillion. It goes million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintrillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, googol, googolplex.
Posted by: matt | Apr 28, 2009 6:23:19 PM
Can we make it there before the aliens arrive.
Posted by: yang | Apr 28, 2009 6:27:16 PM
quote from above "Since the universe itself is believed to be 13.7 years old, the explosion happened when"
I'm assuming that should be 13.7 Billion years old. I've heard the earth is estimated to be upwards of 40 billion. I wonder how they can estimate this stuff
Posted by: spark | Apr 28, 2009 6:30:38 PM
Matt, I had to do something with the 400. You rounded it off, and they did, too in the article but not the title; I'd say no big deal but its a huge big deal heh. Anyway, that table sat your link stops at octillion. What comes next? Non(t)illion? Dec(a)tillion? Now I know I'm being silly because I will never remember it anyway. Scientific notation (abbreviation of these huge numbers and the teeny tiny ones) was almost my undoing.
Posted by: BridgetoSomewhere | Apr 28, 2009 6:32:11 PM
Post a comment
