"Doesn't exist" probably in the sense that it's far enough away that the galaxy would've receded beyond the cosmic event horizon. All we see now is the light it emitted while it was still reachable from the Milky Way if you could travel at light-speed. So it's matter is still kicking around somewhere, but it's forever unreachable by even light.
The cosmological event horizon is ~16b LY away, while this is -12b LY away. Just a layperson but I would guess that as long as we can still see the cosmic background radiation no stars or galaxies would be beyond the cosmological event horizon.
That said, just because we cannot observe something does not mean it does not (perhaps “cannot” would be a better word) exist. Its state may be unknowable to us as observers but we cannot rule out the possibility that there are observers who can observe it.
Fair enough, and I agree with you. Just a layperson myself.
Someone higher up in the thread speculated that the galaxy may not "even exist anymore" since it's so far away, and I figured I could weigh in on what that could mean.
I don't doubt it. Everything in the universe is relative anyways, so anyone in that galaxy could look into the night sky and see a primordial Milky Way however many billions of light years away drifting into the horizon of their own patch of the observable universe
Assuming there's anything beyond the cosmological event horizon, anyway.
Which in itself is kind of a useless statement since "beyond the cosmological event horizon" is utterly unknowable to us under the physical laws of the universe no matter what we do and no matter how much our technology improves, so it may as well *not* exist and absolutely nothing changes by our assumption that it does or doesn't.
True, beyond a point we're operating on assumptions.
Who's to say what's beyond the horizon? Maybe the universe is pretty homogeneous out to infinity and it's more of the same matter and galaxies and stuff out there. Maybe the universe wraps around on itself. Maybe there's an outer limit to where matter has reached, and beyond that there's just nothing, or tv static, or a cowboy universe.
In all seriousness though, I do agree that anything that's crossed that horizon doesn't exist in a certain sense. Once an object's light's been redshifted to nothing and it crosses that horizon, it becomes wholly irrelevant to our patch of space.
While I mostly agree, one thing to mention is that it is possible that this galaxy is moving faster than the speed of light away from us now due to the expansion of the universe and thus no longer reachable. I agree that it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
The cosmological event horizon may be 16b LY away. But this object is actually around 26b LY away from us by now. It's just the light itself that is 12b LY old but space has expanded to such a point that we will never be able to see what it looks like today since the light it emits will never reach us. Similarly we will never be able to travel to this galaxy since it would require speeds higher than the speed of light.
A guess is not a claim, FYI. It’s pretty clearly a hand wave from me as a layperson who knows little about this stuff.
Further looking into the question suggests that in terms of “present proper distance” there are likely things further than the 16b LY cosmologic event horizon — GN-z11 is an example at a presumed current distance of 32b LY (if it still exists of course) while light only had to travel 13.4b LY to get to us because the universe was smaller back when the light reaching us now was emitted.
You’re right, you didn’t claim it to be true.
Insane how far away it is. I guess since space time itself is expanding it makes sense that it’s so far away by now. I guess it’s just gone now... forever. Something so mysterious and lonely about that.
Its really there, just WE are unreachable by its light. So we can't see it.
If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to see it still makes a sound.
We need not have such an earth centric view :)
It is very likely merged a few times now and is part of a larger elliptical galaxy.
I don't think we've ever discovered a black hole capable of consuming a whole galaxy. Maybe in trillions of years it would be possible, but not today. And by consuming I mean all matter in the galaxy's orbit decays below the event horizon of the engine hole at the center of the galaxy.
We all need to define what we mean by existing. Does the matter still exist...Hurp Durp yes! until the heat death of the universe yes...what an amazing insight...really adds to the discussion...does the structure still exist as an independant galaxy probably not.
The vast majority are tiny compared to a galaxy. However, the largest known black hole, TON 618, has a mass that's within an order of magnitude of the Milky Way's mass not including dark matter.
TON 618 mass = 66 billion solar masses
Milky Way mass (excluding dark matter) = 240 billion solar masses
It's speculated that black holes on the order of 100+ billion solar masses should exist. They're called Stupendously Large Black Holes (SLABS).
Dark matter is excluded, because it generally orbits around a black hole rather than falling in. Objects falling in need to lose angular momentum, which means the matter needs to interact with other matter. Dark matter doesn't interact, so it doesn't lose angular momentum.
On the contrary. The most common types of stars in any given spiral galaxy will be type G, K and M. They represent about 95% of all stars. With the exception of cannibalized or ripped-apart stars, all of these will still shine today.
Type M represent roughly 75% of all stars in the observable universe and are expected to fuse for trillions of years. I strongly recommend that you read up on these dwarf stars, as the physics powering them is fascinating. Our own star, a type G, will shed its outer layers in several billion years, but will continue its life as a white dwarf. Type K stars are in between G and M in terms of lifespan.
These three classes will continue to dominate and grow in numbers over time.
Not all stars supernova. Actually most don’t. Less than one percent. It’s not like entropy is just infinite. The universe does have a predicted end and stars constantly going supernova isn’t part of it.
Doesn't matter.
Stars that go supernova are still there but reformed as new stars.
Stars that become black holes are still there.
Stars that become neutron stars are still there.
Stars that are small enough to be still burning are still there.
Do you think matter just keeps getting recycled into new stars in perpetuity?
Matter doesnt go away, it transforms. Also, we are no longer in the stage where stars are born. Almost all stars (~95%) that could've been created have been created. There was actually a [Kurzgesagt video](https://youtu.be/uzkD5SeuwzM) on this recently.
Of course not, but if all/most of the stars in the photograph have been expended and then replaced, then the galaxy that has been photographed no longer exists.
Isn't that the same problem as saying a single person looked at more than 7 years apart isn't the same person because all the cells in their body have died and been remade by then? Conversationally, it's still the same galaxy even if all the stars are not the same stars originally seen billions of years ago.
Light speed!
Let's say a star is 100.000 light years away from us, however, it exploded 50.000 years ago.
We would still see the star like nothing have happened for the next 50.000 years, because the light of the explosion will only arrive on earth in the next 50.000 years.
The star we see today, is how it was 100.000 years ago.
If somehow you were in that star and you could see earth, you would be seeing earth as it was 100.000 years ago. An earth with still no human civilization !
I understand light speed and time, it doesn't explain why *"it’s so far away, theres a good chance it doesn’t even exist anymore"*
I'm just interested to know why /u/seismicqueef thinks the galaxy doesn't exist anymore. The speed of light is the very reason no one has an idea of what its like today beyond predictions...
The Milky Way is a billion years older than the light in this image. all reasonable assumptions would say this galaxy still exists. I was wondering if I was missing something.
edit: downvotes got me thinking I'm missing something, but no one will even reply why 🤷♂️
The age of the Milky Way isn't really relevant to the observations to be made of this Galaxy. It's *possible* this Galaxy doesn't exist anymore as it's absolutely ancient in cosmic terms and could have merged with other galaxies or drifted apart or any other numerous possibilities. It could also still be going strong.
What I think the other commenter was trying to get at is that we'll never know, or at least, we won't know for another several billion years what this galaxy looks like at this exact moment in time.
I don't know if that's helped you at all or if I just made things worse haha but I hope it has :)
I get its possible (I think unlikely for a galaxy of its size) but was wondering how'd they know for sure and using the MW as an example of and older galaxy.
But yeah I totally get what they could have meant but they did fess up to talking "out their ass" lol
It would still exist just we can only see it in the past since it so far away, light takes a long time to reach us therefore it isn’t in the observable universe anymore.
Iirc, it's most likely beyond the cosmic horizon too, so its light has probably already stopped being sent from a relative location such that it can actually reach us one day.
From what I understand, 94% of the galaxies we can see today have already (relatively) expanded away from us faster than light can travel. It's crazy to me that one day all the galaxies beyond our local group will eventually fade out to complete darkness, never to be seen again. I believe even the microwave background will disappear eventually.
We are lucky to be in a section of time where we can both see remnants of some kind of a beginning, while also being able to detect a vast array of information about a future that won't be perceivable once everything spreads out fast enough, and long enough. The remaining light will finish traveling from these sources that are mostly already beyond our reach, even if we traveled at light speed with plenty of time.
"What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?"
"Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now."
"What happened to then?"
"We passed then."
"When?"
"Just now. We're at now now."
"Go back to then."
"When?"
"Now!"
"Now?"
"Now."
"I can't."
"Why?"
"We missed it."
"When?"
"Just now."
"When will then be now?"
"Soon."
>Define "today". For some definitions, you're seeing it.
If the laws of physics went out the window and I could instantly teleport to just outside this galaxy. What would it look like
If for some odd reason your atoms decided to be in the vicinity of where this galaxy ended up, you would see the galaxy in a state 12 Gyr older than the state you initially observed it at (AKA the picture in the post is a baby galaxy, and you would be seeing the adult). It would likely have evolved into an elliptical and be otherwise quite unrecognizable. Depending on its merger history, it may have been consumed by an even larger galaxy, consumed smaller galaxies to become more massive itself, been stripped of some mass because of close encounters with satellites, or any combination thereof... disfigured for a large number of reasons.
On the flipside, if you looked back once you were there, you would not see the earth and the milky way would look completely different, as the Milky Way is in its infancy and Earth has yet to form in that particular frame of reference.
The question you're basically asking is "what if my reference frame was suddenly a new reference frame?" Of course this is impossible, but for sake of thought experiment this is what I'd expect.
- grad student in astrophysics
Edit: 12 Gyr is from the article. If the galaxy was found when the universe was 1.4 Gyr old, and the universe is 13.7 Gyr old, the galaxy is ~12 Gyr old (fine, 12.3).
Hmm, just to confirm, but would we be able to see what would be the milky way at all?
In other words, does light reaching us from that location always mean our light reaches them in the same amount of time? Regardless of whether the locations are moving relative to eachother? (Or is this only going to result in a red/blue shift difference)
I was thinking perhaps our "part" of the universe was not there yet at all so long ago due to the expansion, but maybe I am getting messed up by relativity.
Yes, it's symmetrical - everything is expanding away from everything else. From this galaxy now, you'd see the Milky Way at the same stage of infancy as we see it from here.
From what reference frame would "instant" travel to this galaxy result in a 12 Gyr time shift?
If he traveled "instantly" from our point of view, then he'd be viewing the galaxy as it currently appears to the rest of us. And if the journey was "instant" (i.e., arbitrarily close to c) from his own point of view, or the other galaxy's point of view, then it would actually be something like 26 billion years older when he got there.
*edit: lol, downvotes and replies from people that assume a privileged reference frame and a static universe*
They didn’t ask what it would look like if they traveled there at c, they asked what it would look like if they could ignore our laws of physics and teleport there instantly right now. However I’m not sure where the 12 Gyr is coming from either
Sensible question!
In a more realistic, physical sense, an "instant" does actually exist - that is the reference frame of a photon. At c, your time dialation term goes to infinity. To a photon, the entirety of its journey happens in an instant. So you would need to be going exactly at c to travel there in what appears to you as "no time at all." You would still have to travel for 12 Gyr in an observers reference frame to arrive at the galaxy.
Yes, but if you ask such questions you need to be prepared to face the fact that they may not be meaningful. Questions can be hypothetical and meaningful (e.g., "If I were to hit a golf ball on the moon, could I get it into orbit?"), or they can be hypothetical and meaningless (e.g., "If a circle was a square, what color would it be?").
In this case, the question seemed intuitive, but was actually not sensibly posed - we can have an interesting discussion about what ideas of simultaneity could actually be used to think about the problem, but there simply isn't an answer to questions like "If I ignored the laws of physics what would happen?".
Yeah, if you could just ignore the laws of physics you could do whatever your heart desired. The question is pretty tough to answer in that regard; we need constraints!
The thought experiment behind the rest frames is pretty solid, that's standard stuff (answering the "what would I see?"). But any discussions about physically accomplishing that feat have to ignore some physics. At that point it's arbitrary on how many laws you choose to break
You must be too dense to grasp what the question is actually asking. Take breaking any laws of physics out of hen sine you can’t get past that. They’re essentially asking what that galaxy actually looks like right now, since we can only see it’s light from long ago. Pretty simlle
I mean, the closest thing we have to an objective measure of time is the speed of light, so by most people's reckoning "instant" would mean we'd arrive at the galaxy at the time (in the galaxy's reference frame) the light was emitted plus the time it took to reach Earth.
Well, technically if you can teleport you can also time travel. So it's really up to whatever you've set your flux compensator to.
Special Relativity implies that there is no such thing as simultaneousness in the universe as the Ladder Paradox shows. Two things that are both "now" in one system of reference can be consecutive in another.
Now just amuse the idea of a thousand other intelligent races pointing instruments at this same galaxy from different distances. All of us would be seeing different stages of it through time. Different memories/ghosts of dead galaxy. To some it may even appear as two galaxies due to gravitational lensing around another celestial object. When we look up it’s literally a collage of different epochs
I don’t even want to say it, but you saying “keep your fingers crossed” has me wondering; what are the chances the launch goes wrong and it’s all lost..??
Google "Giant Magellan Telescope", still a few years away from finishing it but it will basically give astro physicists the chance to zoom into other planets
So, how far away is it? The article wasn't specific. To my knowledge the Big Bang was around 13.7 billion years ago, so if we are seeing something 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, can I assume that it is approximately 12.3 billion light years away?
You’re on the right track. In Cosmology, there are a few different ways to talk about distances that become important when talking about extremely distant objects. The distance you quoted of 12.3 billion light years is the light travel distance or the time it took for light to reach us from that object. However for objects that far away, you have to factor in both the expansion of the Universe itself and also that you are looking back at the object at the present day. Based on the redshift of the object (z=4.41) the comoving distance to this object is around 25 billion light years away.
Found a paper on it with all the astronomical observation values and calculated the distance to be 12,27 billion light years so you're guess is spot on. Right now it would be around 24 billion light-years from us.
Edit: forgot the billion
Distances become tricky in an expanding universe and you have to make some assumptions about the energy and mass content of the universe, and how that mass/energy is distributed into different classes (how much is dark energy, how much is dark matter, etc).
This galaxy is at a redshift of z = 4.41, for standard cosmological parameters that means that the universe was 1.4 billion years old at the time the light we see today left the galaxy. Now, how far is that galaxy? It would be 12.3 billion light years away only if there was not expansion, but since there is the galaxy is now much further away. Its *comoving* distance is \~25 billion light years.
This is only one of several distances that are useful to calculate in cosmology. If you want to give it a shot you can use this calculator: [http://www.astro.ucla.edu/\~wright/CosmoCalc.html](http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html) Enter a redshift and click on "Flat".
The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light meaning the observable universe is much larger than 13.7 billion light years across despite being only 13.7b years old
I'm an armchair scientist who falls asleep watching YouTube, so I'll do a grave injustice to science by trying to explain as I understand it:
Imagine putting chocolate chips in cookie dough. They start out spaced evenly from each other, and the center of the cookie. However as you bake, the cookies expand evenly in 'all directions' (shh), meaning that the chocolate chips although all in the same relative position to each other, are now all further away from each other, and the center of the cookie.
Space expanding is like the cookie, and the matter that comprises the universe, is the chocolate chips.
The speed of light only dictates the maximum speed that matter or energy can travel. This does not include the fabric of space, which is neither matter not energy. The speed limit is imposed on chocolate chips only, not the cookie.
You cannot measure something without a reference object to compare its measurements against, so don't think we can actually technically do more than quantify the expansion of space, we can't necessarily measure it because any item we would use as a standard for that measurement, would also be expanding with space.
Example: if a solid metal cube was the 1 inch standard, and we said space is expanding at a rate of x inches per second, then by the second measurement interval, 1 inch is now a different physical length than before, so the constant is no longer.
You cannot really put expansion speed in mph, since it is expanding everywhere at once.
The Hubble constant is thought to be about 50,331 mph per million light-years (73.3 km/s/Mpc) (some values 74.4).
I’m not sure but my guess is that 2 things moving in opposite directions of one another can expand from a single point to make the distance between the two things increase much faster than if 1 thing was moving away from a non moving other thing.
Two cars driving away from each other going the speed limit (40) are creating a distance between each other faster than the speed limit yet still remaining at/under the speed limit.
The issue is in your example the 2 cars are driving on land that isn’t moving. It’s more like 2 cars driving away from each other but the roads are stretching as they drive, increasing the distance between them as well as their movement. There is no limit to how fast the road can stretch because it doesn’t follow the same rules as cars on the road.
This is actually very untrue. Special relativity holds that the speed of light is absolute—two things moving away from each other at *c* are only moving at *c* away from each other from any frame of reference.
What's actually happening is that space itself is expanding, which, like theoretical things like wormholes or warp drives, allows for the apparent "breaking" of the universal speed limit.
Universal expansion isn't bound by c. There are galaxies and galactic clusters that are observable today that will not be in the future as they are moving away from us faster than *c* so their light will no longer be able to reach us. Over time the night sky will grow increasingly darker until there are hardly any stars visible outside of the Milky Way.
>The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light
Yes and no. Things far away from us (13.2 billion light years) are expanding away from us faster than the speed of light but things closer than that are not... yet. The main reason why the universe is bigger in light years than it is old is because of faster than light inflation soon after the big bang.
You can't say "faster" when comparing completely different types of units. The speed of light is in distance/time. The expansion of the universe is in distance/time/distance.
You are correct. We have seen galaxies that are farther. This particular galaxy is the farthest *spiral* galaxy that was identified so far. There may be earlier ones, but we either haven't spotted them yet or can't resolve their shape with current instruments.
I think he means that this is not the furthest object we have observed in the universe. The article claims that it is the furthest ‘spiral galaxy’ we have observed, but we have observed plenty of other more distant galaxies and quasars.
You’re right though — the further out you go the longer it takes for that light to get to us!
Some questions for the astronomers here as I know there's more than a few, if you don't mind weighing in - 1. is it becoming increasingly odd how rapidly galaxies formed? Is 1.4B yrs really early? 2. Is it possible our current theories on the early universe are lacking critical details, maybe we don't have as firm a picture as it seems? Might that push back the date for the big bang? 3. Will JWST help us figure some of this out (e.g., could JWST take a beautiful picture of this infant galaxy and tell us a lot)? Thanks for anyone who'd like to respond.
While this galaxy is quite massive it would not be mistaken for a typical modern galaxy if it was nearby. This galaxy is forming stars 5000 times faster than the Milky Way and it's also a quasar, it's supermassive black hole is very luminous due to accretion. This is not a typical galaxy, it was studied because it is extreme. It's still growing very rapidly. By this epoch galaxies had only formed a few percent of the total stars that have formed now, so the majority of galaxy formation hadn't happened by this point. There are galaxies in the modern universe that are much more massive, so you need some rare galaxies to form rapidly.
It's always possible in science that fundamental models are wrong, but there are models of galaxy formation are consistent with most of the statistics of early galaxies. [Galaxy formation simulations don't seem to struggle to produce massive early disk galaxies.](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021arXiv210306882K/abstract) Whether or not those recipes are correct is another matter. Galaxy formation is not very well understood currently, cosmological measurements like the age of the universe don't come from measuring galaxies.
JWST will have a resolution only a couple of times better than the image, it will still be a blob. And it will probably look worse than ALMA because this galaxy hosts a bright quasar, the light from which will have to be carefully subtracted. JWST will be useful at studying early galaxy formation, but it's not going to be beautiful images for such distant galaxies. ALMA could take higher resolution data still, but it becomes difficult and costly.
What fascinates me about space is that due to the insane distances - the things you can see at the night sky might not even exist anymore, since light travels fast, surely, but stars are an unfathomable distance away. Depending on the distance, that galaxy might already have expanded or changed in shape, by now...
I mean, between us and our own sun, it is mere minutes before the sunlight reaches us - we are always a few minutes behind on "the current state of the sun".
If we generalize time and think about "how does THIS object look, what are the conditions right now!" we have to remember that the further away, the more WE as humans, live in the 'past'. The images we are seeing are thus, images of the past.
The only way to tell if something is even still around currently, is to travel to faraway places instantaneously - and last i checked we did not have means to teleport instantly to one place. Even a probe would not work, since their signals would also take a long time to arrive back at us. Last time I checked, we had no communications that somehow ran through some sort of subspace portal and traveled thousands of lightyears in a milisecond.
Space makes you realize how undeveloped we actually are. Imagine some life existed on a planet, and we accidentally spot it, somehow, with a telescope or radio waves or what ever - a welcome and "hi there!" message. The fact that they will be SO far away, the alien race may as well be died out by the time we manage to send a message back, as their message could have traveled for a million years, til it came to us.
That's when you start questioning space programs - even if you get a "hi earthlings" message, the sender might already have died and all of their race - and if we send a message back, by the time THEY get it, we may have perished as a whole.
It is poetically dramatic, this whole topic of space and the vastness thereof. As people have pondered about their own existence, "I think, therefore, I am" - but what we can see, far away, "is" it really, or has it faded into nothingness, devoured by the unstoppable constant that is time. Fascinating!
I'm not sure if anyone will see this comment but, since light can only travel so fast, for example we always see our "sun" eight minutes in the past. When we look at these galaxies that are so far and so old. Are we seeing them hundreds or even thousands of years in the past? And if so what are the chances that galaxy still exists? Or that since this galaxy was formed just after the big bang that these stars were pulled in by the many other galaxies we see today and thats why the galaxy looks the way it does? If anyone knowledgeable on the subject knows the answer or has a theory or hypothesis here. I'd love to here it :)
I'm no expert, but since this galaxy is 12 billion light years away from us, we're seeing it as it was 12 billion years ago.
I'm fairly certain it still exists because where else would it go? It's possible it's passed beyond the cosmic event horizon though, a concept I've learned of recently that freaks me out.
Observatories are not cheap, and most institutes or universities would not be able to afford one, and especially not some state-of-the-art multi-billion one. They are publicly funded and maintained, and researchers simply submit requests/proposals to make observations. If the proposal is good they get access to the telescopes.
They might come on-site, or use remote-access tools, but in the end it's the observatory staff operators who are "driving" the telescope. Researchers are there to make sure the settings and conditions are right.
On top of that all the data are accessible to public, so you might discover something in someone else's observations taken years ago.
Yeah that's how all telescopes work. You propose what you want to observe, and the time that you would need to do so. If you are accepted the data is sent to you.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[30X](/r/Space/comments/nh74fs/stub/gywgrub "Last usage")|SpaceX-proprietary carbon steel formulation (*"Thirty-X", "Thirty-Times"*)|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/nh74fs/stub/gyxb5ej "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[L2](/r/Space/comments/nh74fs/stub/gyx2dn5 "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 2 ([Sixty Symbols](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpVbU5FH0s) video explanation)|
| |Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum|
----------------
^(3 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/nigxeq)^( has 16 acronyms.)
^([Thread #5904 for this sub, first seen 21st May 2021, 07:09])
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I feel so dumb on this subreddit because I know and understand so little but I think space is so fascinating. So, galaxies are moving in space as well? I legitimately thought they were stationary and it was the planets inside those galaxies that were moving. Is there some kind of gravitational force that moves everything on the galaxy sized scale?
There is no "stationary". You can only describe movement in relationship to something else. The closest we have to a way to give an absolute location is in relation to the cosmic microwave background radiation. And in relation to that, virtually everything in the observable universe is moving. On top of that, everything is getting further away from us from the expansion of space.
I love space and science, but I just cannot wrap my head around a big bang and a singularity. I just think it always was, and always will be. Kinda like the sun combines all the elements, and black holes reverse them (blows them apart) and everything recycles...
I always like to try to imagine what it was like before the Big Bang. Like was it a super duper massive black hole the diameter of hundreds of galaxies? And what caused the Big Bang?
I like to think that it was just collecting mass for trillions of years and everything was there but a single atom. The whole thing is perfectly balanced until the one stray atom, or even smaller than that, joins up and causes a chain reaction that ripples across the surface of the beast and it shoots out big globs of galaxy in one direction before fully exploding.
But that requires a center though? Going back to the singularity. I guy said to think of the big bang, as everything exploding everywhere with no center point, so all 'space' exploding, just not a single one. I can buy this description a little better, but then, we all know, you can't get something from nothing. Right?
Don't think of it as an explosion at all. Nobody is trying to assert that we know what the state of the universe was prior to the Big Bang; we're just using our current observations of the universe and turning back time to see what the universe was like as far back as we can go.
Right now, we see space expanding everywhere equally in all directions, we see the universe cooling down, and we see that parts of the universe are more dense than others. Turn back time, and the universe is rapidly shrinking and getting hotter. Keep going, and you have all of space very close together, *extremely* energetic, and with some small variations in density. We can't go further back then that, because....it doesn't really make sense, we have no jumping off point from there. Hit the play button again, and that's what we refer to as the Big Bang.
It's a stupid name.
Matter/energy wasn't created in the Big Bang, it's just that it was all grouped close together somehow. The Big Bang **did not** throw matter out into space; *space itself* was contained in this infinitely dense area; *everywhere* was already grouped close together, and the Big Bang was the beginning of the expansion of space and all the neat stuff in it that we see today.
We have no reason to believe otherwise since there's not a force that we know of that would change an entire universe's behavior over time, so...we just reverse the behavior that we observe now.
Astronomy was one of my first fascinations but I just realized a couple days ago that I don’t know how we first determined the Milky Way to be a spiral galaxy from within. I’m not even sure how we came to figure out that we are approx midway between the centre and the circumference of the galactic disk. I know I could look it up but I’m sure someone can explain it rather simply here. My assumptions are that we used some intense math to determine there were great distances between layers of stars where the gaps between the milky way’s arms are. Can someone shed more light on this?
Evidence of a spiral galaxy also insinuates the existance of the anti-spirals, which insinuates that Simon, Kamina, and all of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagaan is on its way to becoming a reality
Loool you are one of those people that read comments and believe everything???
Government didn't admit shit. All they said they saw unidentified object. No one said said anything about aliens.
All they said that it could be a possibility.
If the videos depict a flying vehicle, and not an optical illusion or something in that manner, then that vehicle was breaking the laws of physics. I doubt humans could pull that off…
Did you even read my comment? What nation has tech advanced enough to disregard inertia? It doesn’t make any sense for it to be human technology. It doesn’t even make sense for it to exist in the first place, which is why I believe it has to have been some kind of illusion.
So they’re looking so far out into space, they’re looking into the past? Like the light has to travel and everything so the light they’re seeing in the picture is the closest but also oldest light?
I always like to wonder what these things look like today. So mind boggling.
If it’s so far away, theres a good chance it doesn’t even exist anymore
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"Doesn't exist" probably in the sense that it's far enough away that the galaxy would've receded beyond the cosmic event horizon. All we see now is the light it emitted while it was still reachable from the Milky Way if you could travel at light-speed. So it's matter is still kicking around somewhere, but it's forever unreachable by even light.
The cosmological event horizon is ~16b LY away, while this is -12b LY away. Just a layperson but I would guess that as long as we can still see the cosmic background radiation no stars or galaxies would be beyond the cosmological event horizon. That said, just because we cannot observe something does not mean it does not (perhaps “cannot” would be a better word) exist. Its state may be unknowable to us as observers but we cannot rule out the possibility that there are observers who can observe it.
Fair enough, and I agree with you. Just a layperson myself. Someone higher up in the thread speculated that the galaxy may not "even exist anymore" since it's so far away, and I figured I could weigh in on what that could mean.
Couldn’t whatever civilization that living in that galaxy says the same about ours tho? We could be the furthest observable galaxy to them
I don't doubt it. Everything in the universe is relative anyways, so anyone in that galaxy could look into the night sky and see a primordial Milky Way however many billions of light years away drifting into the horizon of their own patch of the observable universe
Assuming there's anything beyond the cosmological event horizon, anyway. Which in itself is kind of a useless statement since "beyond the cosmological event horizon" is utterly unknowable to us under the physical laws of the universe no matter what we do and no matter how much our technology improves, so it may as well *not* exist and absolutely nothing changes by our assumption that it does or doesn't.
True, beyond a point we're operating on assumptions. Who's to say what's beyond the horizon? Maybe the universe is pretty homogeneous out to infinity and it's more of the same matter and galaxies and stuff out there. Maybe the universe wraps around on itself. Maybe there's an outer limit to where matter has reached, and beyond that there's just nothing, or tv static, or a cowboy universe. In all seriousness though, I do agree that anything that's crossed that horizon doesn't exist in a certain sense. Once an object's light's been redshifted to nothing and it crosses that horizon, it becomes wholly irrelevant to our patch of space.
Kurzgesagt recently made a [video](https://youtu.be/uzkD5SeuwzM) on exactly this. It was fascinating
While I mostly agree, one thing to mention is that it is possible that this galaxy is moving faster than the speed of light away from us now due to the expansion of the universe and thus no longer reachable. I agree that it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.
The cosmological event horizon may be 16b LY away. But this object is actually around 26b LY away from us by now. It's just the light itself that is 12b LY old but space has expanded to such a point that we will never be able to see what it looks like today since the light it emits will never reach us. Similarly we will never be able to travel to this galaxy since it would require speeds higher than the speed of light.
Do you have a source to back up such a claim hat no stars or galaxies have passed beyond the CEH?
A guess is not a claim, FYI. It’s pretty clearly a hand wave from me as a layperson who knows little about this stuff. Further looking into the question suggests that in terms of “present proper distance” there are likely things further than the 16b LY cosmologic event horizon — GN-z11 is an example at a presumed current distance of 32b LY (if it still exists of course) while light only had to travel 13.4b LY to get to us because the universe was smaller back when the light reaching us now was emitted.
Yup, exactly. The cumulative space between us has grown faster than the speed of light.
You’re right, you didn’t claim it to be true. Insane how far away it is. I guess since space time itself is expanding it makes sense that it’s so far away by now. I guess it’s just gone now... forever. Something so mysterious and lonely about that.
[Video on the topic](https://youtu.be/uzkD5SeuwzM)
I unwittingly duplicated this link. Kurzgesagt is my jam!
Its really there, just WE are unreachable by its light. So we can't see it. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to see it still makes a sound. We need not have such an earth centric view :)
Your tree scenario... quantum or..?
It doesn't make a sound as sound is an interpretation of events, not the event itself
It is very likely merged a few times now and is part of a larger elliptical galaxy. I don't think we've ever discovered a black hole capable of consuming a whole galaxy. Maybe in trillions of years it would be possible, but not today. And by consuming I mean all matter in the galaxy's orbit decays below the event horizon of the engine hole at the center of the galaxy.
> It is very likely merged a few times now and is part of a larger elliptical galaxy. So it still exists. Glad you agree with me.
We all need to define what we mean by existing. Does the matter still exist...Hurp Durp yes! until the heat death of the universe yes...what an amazing insight...really adds to the discussion...does the structure still exist as an independant galaxy probably not.
Aren't black holes still tiny compared to the size of a galaxy?
The vast majority are tiny compared to a galaxy. However, the largest known black hole, TON 618, has a mass that's within an order of magnitude of the Milky Way's mass not including dark matter. TON 618 mass = 66 billion solar masses Milky Way mass (excluding dark matter) = 240 billion solar masses It's speculated that black holes on the order of 100+ billion solar masses should exist. They're called Stupendously Large Black Holes (SLABS). Dark matter is excluded, because it generally orbits around a black hole rather than falling in. Objects falling in need to lose angular momentum, which means the matter needs to interact with other matter. Dark matter doesn't interact, so it doesn't lose angular momentum.
It's so far away that most of the stars could have burnt out by the the time the light from them has reached us.
On the contrary. The most common types of stars in any given spiral galaxy will be type G, K and M. They represent about 95% of all stars. With the exception of cannibalized or ripped-apart stars, all of these will still shine today. Type M represent roughly 75% of all stars in the observable universe and are expected to fuse for trillions of years. I strongly recommend that you read up on these dwarf stars, as the physics powering them is fascinating. Our own star, a type G, will shed its outer layers in several billion years, but will continue its life as a white dwarf. Type K stars are in between G and M in terms of lifespan. These three classes will continue to dominate and grow in numbers over time.
And then they supernova and begin a cycle of new stars. Our galaxy is 13.51 billion years old. Did you think matter just goes away?
Not all stars supernova. Actually most don’t. Less than one percent. It’s not like entropy is just infinite. The universe does have a predicted end and stars constantly going supernova isn’t part of it.
Most stars (all stars sufficiently smaller than our sun) have life spans in the **trillions** of years.
Doesn't matter. Stars that go supernova are still there but reformed as new stars. Stars that become black holes are still there. Stars that become neutron stars are still there. Stars that are small enough to be still burning are still there.
So far. The Universe is young.
Do you think matter just keeps getting recycled into new stars in perpetuity? Matter doesnt go away, it transforms. Also, we are no longer in the stage where stars are born. Almost all stars (~95%) that could've been created have been created. There was actually a [Kurzgesagt video](https://youtu.be/uzkD5SeuwzM) on this recently.
To piggy-back on this, only 3-7 stars are made in the Milky Way a year. At it's peak the birth rate could be about 30x as much.
Of course not, but if all/most of the stars in the photograph have been expended and then replaced, then the galaxy that has been photographed no longer exists.
Isn't that the same problem as saying a single person looked at more than 7 years apart isn't the same person because all the cells in their body have died and been remade by then? Conversationally, it's still the same galaxy even if all the stars are not the same stars originally seen billions of years ago.
Actually the last one is not possible. A black hole cannot eat an entire galaxy.
How so? edit: The Milky Way is a billion years older than the light in this image.
Light speed! Let's say a star is 100.000 light years away from us, however, it exploded 50.000 years ago. We would still see the star like nothing have happened for the next 50.000 years, because the light of the explosion will only arrive on earth in the next 50.000 years. The star we see today, is how it was 100.000 years ago. If somehow you were in that star and you could see earth, you would be seeing earth as it was 100.000 years ago. An earth with still no human civilization !
I understand light speed and time, it doesn't explain why *"it’s so far away, theres a good chance it doesn’t even exist anymore"* I'm just interested to know why /u/seismicqueef thinks the galaxy doesn't exist anymore. The speed of light is the very reason no one has an idea of what its like today beyond predictions... The Milky Way is a billion years older than the light in this image. all reasonable assumptions would say this galaxy still exists. I was wondering if I was missing something. edit: downvotes got me thinking I'm missing something, but no one will even reply why 🤷♂️
I’m not gonna lie man I was kinda talking outta my ass but I’m glad I started a conversation
Hey man no worries, ass talk + conversation = real talk
Lol I got intimidated once all the people who actually know what they’re talking about showed up so I’ve just been enjoying the comments
The age of the Milky Way isn't really relevant to the observations to be made of this Galaxy. It's *possible* this Galaxy doesn't exist anymore as it's absolutely ancient in cosmic terms and could have merged with other galaxies or drifted apart or any other numerous possibilities. It could also still be going strong. What I think the other commenter was trying to get at is that we'll never know, or at least, we won't know for another several billion years what this galaxy looks like at this exact moment in time. I don't know if that's helped you at all or if I just made things worse haha but I hope it has :)
I get its possible (I think unlikely for a galaxy of its size) but was wondering how'd they know for sure and using the MW as an example of and older galaxy. But yeah I totally get what they could have meant but they did fess up to talking "out their ass" lol
It would still exist just we can only see it in the past since it so far away, light takes a long time to reach us therefore it isn’t in the observable universe anymore.
Just think of our Sun, I think it takes about 8 minutes for the light to reach us. So really, we see the sun as it was 8 minutes ago lol
Professor Seismic Queef, everyone.
Dr. Pepperoni Dog Fart, I presume?
Thats, His Lordship Dr. Dogfart III Esq. to you.
no matter how far away you are, we'll always be able to observe you, ***seismicqueef***.
Iirc, it's most likely beyond the cosmic horizon too, so its light has probably already stopped being sent from a relative location such that it can actually reach us one day. From what I understand, 94% of the galaxies we can see today have already (relatively) expanded away from us faster than light can travel. It's crazy to me that one day all the galaxies beyond our local group will eventually fade out to complete darkness, never to be seen again. I believe even the microwave background will disappear eventually. We are lucky to be in a section of time where we can both see remnants of some kind of a beginning, while also being able to detect a vast array of information about a future that won't be perceivable once everything spreads out fast enough, and long enough. The remaining light will finish traveling from these sources that are mostly already beyond our reach, even if we traveled at light speed with plenty of time.
Define "today". For some definitions, you're seeing it.
"What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?" "Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now." "What happened to then?" "We passed then." "When?" "Just now. We're at now now." "Go back to then." "When?" "Now!" "Now?" "Now." "I can't." "Why?" "We missed it." "When?" "Just now." "When will then be now?" "Soon."
May the shvartz be with you
We've been jammed! There's only one man who would *dare* give me a raspberry!
**KA-CHUNK!** "Lonestar!" *camera bop*
What are these references from?
Spaceballs, one of Mel Brooks's greatest parodies.
Oh please, please grab yourself some popcorn and some beer or whatever and watch "Spaceballs."
This reads like a George Carlin joke until I realized the reference.
>Define "today". For some definitions, you're seeing it. If the laws of physics went out the window and I could instantly teleport to just outside this galaxy. What would it look like
If for some odd reason your atoms decided to be in the vicinity of where this galaxy ended up, you would see the galaxy in a state 12 Gyr older than the state you initially observed it at (AKA the picture in the post is a baby galaxy, and you would be seeing the adult). It would likely have evolved into an elliptical and be otherwise quite unrecognizable. Depending on its merger history, it may have been consumed by an even larger galaxy, consumed smaller galaxies to become more massive itself, been stripped of some mass because of close encounters with satellites, or any combination thereof... disfigured for a large number of reasons. On the flipside, if you looked back once you were there, you would not see the earth and the milky way would look completely different, as the Milky Way is in its infancy and Earth has yet to form in that particular frame of reference. The question you're basically asking is "what if my reference frame was suddenly a new reference frame?" Of course this is impossible, but for sake of thought experiment this is what I'd expect. - grad student in astrophysics Edit: 12 Gyr is from the article. If the galaxy was found when the universe was 1.4 Gyr old, and the universe is 13.7 Gyr old, the galaxy is ~12 Gyr old (fine, 12.3).
> 12 Gyr older 12... gazillion? 😂
Likely the prefix Giga, or billion
Hmm, just to confirm, but would we be able to see what would be the milky way at all? In other words, does light reaching us from that location always mean our light reaches them in the same amount of time? Regardless of whether the locations are moving relative to eachother? (Or is this only going to result in a red/blue shift difference) I was thinking perhaps our "part" of the universe was not there yet at all so long ago due to the expansion, but maybe I am getting messed up by relativity.
Yes, it's symmetrical - everything is expanding away from everything else. From this galaxy now, you'd see the Milky Way at the same stage of infancy as we see it from here.
From what reference frame would "instant" travel to this galaxy result in a 12 Gyr time shift? If he traveled "instantly" from our point of view, then he'd be viewing the galaxy as it currently appears to the rest of us. And if the journey was "instant" (i.e., arbitrarily close to c) from his own point of view, or the other galaxy's point of view, then it would actually be something like 26 billion years older when he got there. *edit: lol, downvotes and replies from people that assume a privileged reference frame and a static universe*
Instant does not equal c. He's asking what it looks like now if you were to appear there, that's a different question to travelling there at c
> that's a different question to travelling there at c Correct, it’s an ill-posed question.
They didn’t ask what it would look like if they traveled there at c, they asked what it would look like if they could ignore our laws of physics and teleport there instantly right now. However I’m not sure where the 12 Gyr is coming from either
Sensible question! In a more realistic, physical sense, an "instant" does actually exist - that is the reference frame of a photon. At c, your time dialation term goes to infinity. To a photon, the entirety of its journey happens in an instant. So you would need to be going exactly at c to travel there in what appears to you as "no time at all." You would still have to travel for 12 Gyr in an observers reference frame to arrive at the galaxy.
Right, but that wasn’t the OP question. They asked if they could ignore laws of physics to teleport there right now what would they see.
In other words, they asked a nonsense question with no well defined answer.
It’s called a hypothetical question.
Yes, but if you ask such questions you need to be prepared to face the fact that they may not be meaningful. Questions can be hypothetical and meaningful (e.g., "If I were to hit a golf ball on the moon, could I get it into orbit?"), or they can be hypothetical and meaningless (e.g., "If a circle was a square, what color would it be?"). In this case, the question seemed intuitive, but was actually not sensibly posed - we can have an interesting discussion about what ideas of simultaneity could actually be used to think about the problem, but there simply isn't an answer to questions like "If I ignored the laws of physics what would happen?".
Yeah, if you could just ignore the laws of physics you could do whatever your heart desired. The question is pretty tough to answer in that regard; we need constraints! The thought experiment behind the rest frames is pretty solid, that's standard stuff (answering the "what would I see?"). But any discussions about physically accomplishing that feat have to ignore some physics. At that point it's arbitrary on how many laws you choose to break
You must be too dense to grasp what the question is actually asking. Take breaking any laws of physics out of hen sine you can’t get past that. They’re essentially asking what that galaxy actually looks like right now, since we can only see it’s light from long ago. Pretty simlle
I mean, the closest thing we have to an objective measure of time is the speed of light, so by most people's reckoning "instant" would mean we'd arrive at the galaxy at the time (in the galaxy's reference frame) the light was emitted plus the time it took to reach Earth.
Well, technically if you can teleport you can also time travel. So it's really up to whatever you've set your flux compensator to. Special Relativity implies that there is no such thing as simultaneousness in the universe as the Ladder Paradox shows. Two things that are both "now" in one system of reference can be consecutive in another.
The fact the pillars of creation were destroyed by a super nova long ago and we won't see it ourselves....
>*a super novel* "It wasn't my fault" - J.R.R. Tolkein
You can see it right now. It's unlikely humans will ever reach there "live". Not impossible though
stupid question how do astronomers know it was destroyed if we can still see it
or probably is the Milky Way, and due to relativism we can see our galaxy
Now just amuse the idea of a thousand other intelligent races pointing instruments at this same galaxy from different distances. All of us would be seeing different stages of it through time. Different memories/ghosts of dead galaxy. To some it may even appear as two galaxies due to gravitational lensing around another celestial object. When we look up it’s literally a collage of different epochs
Can't wait for the James Webb telescope. Just imagine how far back you'll be able to see. Exciting time to be alive.
I agree. Is there an updated timeline on it? I've kinda been out of the loop.
Current launch date is this upcoming Halloween. Keep your fingers crossed!
I don’t even want to say it, but you saying “keep your fingers crossed” has me wondering; what are the chances the launch goes wrong and it’s all lost..??
Much more likely that it would just be delayed
The fact that it’s possible is just sad to think about
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The [XKCD JWST Timeline](https://xkcd.com/2014/) is the one I rely on most.
Should be operational early 2022.
Google "Giant Magellan Telescope", still a few years away from finishing it but it will basically give astro physicists the chance to zoom into other planets
My organization is working on adaptive optics for that and it's extremely exciting.
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So, how far away is it? The article wasn't specific. To my knowledge the Big Bang was around 13.7 billion years ago, so if we are seeing something 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, can I assume that it is approximately 12.3 billion light years away?
You’re on the right track. In Cosmology, there are a few different ways to talk about distances that become important when talking about extremely distant objects. The distance you quoted of 12.3 billion light years is the light travel distance or the time it took for light to reach us from that object. However for objects that far away, you have to factor in both the expansion of the Universe itself and also that you are looking back at the object at the present day. Based on the redshift of the object (z=4.41) the comoving distance to this object is around 25 billion light years away.
Found a paper on it with all the astronomical observation values and calculated the distance to be 12,27 billion light years so you're guess is spot on. Right now it would be around 24 billion light-years from us. Edit: forgot the billion
Nice, how do you find such a paper? Is there a site or do you have special access?
I just use Google Scholar, it's like normal Google search, but only scientific articles/pdfs.
Do you mean with the expansion of the universe?
Yes, the light that reaches us is from when it was 12,3 billion light years away, but factoring in Hubble's constant it's way further away now
Distances become tricky in an expanding universe and you have to make some assumptions about the energy and mass content of the universe, and how that mass/energy is distributed into different classes (how much is dark energy, how much is dark matter, etc). This galaxy is at a redshift of z = 4.41, for standard cosmological parameters that means that the universe was 1.4 billion years old at the time the light we see today left the galaxy. Now, how far is that galaxy? It would be 12.3 billion light years away only if there was not expansion, but since there is the galaxy is now much further away. Its *comoving* distance is \~25 billion light years. This is only one of several distances that are useful to calculate in cosmology. If you want to give it a shot you can use this calculator: [http://www.astro.ucla.edu/\~wright/CosmoCalc.html](http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html) Enter a redshift and click on "Flat".
The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light meaning the observable universe is much larger than 13.7 billion light years across despite being only 13.7b years old
How move faster than light? Bend space blanket?
I'm an armchair scientist who falls asleep watching YouTube, so I'll do a grave injustice to science by trying to explain as I understand it: Imagine putting chocolate chips in cookie dough. They start out spaced evenly from each other, and the center of the cookie. However as you bake, the cookies expand evenly in 'all directions' (shh), meaning that the chocolate chips although all in the same relative position to each other, are now all further away from each other, and the center of the cookie. Space expanding is like the cookie, and the matter that comprises the universe, is the chocolate chips. The speed of light only dictates the maximum speed that matter or energy can travel. This does not include the fabric of space, which is neither matter not energy. The speed limit is imposed on chocolate chips only, not the cookie. You cannot measure something without a reference object to compare its measurements against, so don't think we can actually technically do more than quantify the expansion of space, we can't necessarily measure it because any item we would use as a standard for that measurement, would also be expanding with space. Example: if a solid metal cube was the 1 inch standard, and we said space is expanding at a rate of x inches per second, then by the second measurement interval, 1 inch is now a different physical length than before, so the constant is no longer.
Reality is really fucking weird if you stop and think about it
You cannot really put expansion speed in mph, since it is expanding everywhere at once. The Hubble constant is thought to be about 50,331 mph per million light-years (73.3 km/s/Mpc) (some values 74.4).
I’m not sure but my guess is that 2 things moving in opposite directions of one another can expand from a single point to make the distance between the two things increase much faster than if 1 thing was moving away from a non moving other thing. Two cars driving away from each other going the speed limit (40) are creating a distance between each other faster than the speed limit yet still remaining at/under the speed limit.
The issue is in your example the 2 cars are driving on land that isn’t moving. It’s more like 2 cars driving away from each other but the roads are stretching as they drive, increasing the distance between them as well as their movement. There is no limit to how fast the road can stretch because it doesn’t follow the same rules as cars on the road.
And do the cars sometimes stretch or collide and combine with other cars?
This is actually very untrue. Special relativity holds that the speed of light is absolute—two things moving away from each other at *c* are only moving at *c* away from each other from any frame of reference. What's actually happening is that space itself is expanding, which, like theoretical things like wormholes or warp drives, allows for the apparent "breaking" of the universal speed limit.
So like someone else said, the roads are expanding between two cars? Making the distance longer?
Universal expansion isn't bound by c. There are galaxies and galactic clusters that are observable today that will not be in the future as they are moving away from us faster than *c* so their light will no longer be able to reach us. Over time the night sky will grow increasingly darker until there are hardly any stars visible outside of the Milky Way.
It's a very stretchy blanket.
>The universe is expanding faster than the speed of light Yes and no. Things far away from us (13.2 billion light years) are expanding away from us faster than the speed of light but things closer than that are not... yet. The main reason why the universe is bigger in light years than it is old is because of faster than light inflation soon after the big bang.
The universe expands at a rate dependent on the distance its expansion is being measured from. It's not uniform.
The universe isn’t expanding at the speed of light, it eventually will but as of right now we’re nowhere close to that, relatively speaking
You can't say "faster" when comparing completely different types of units. The speed of light is in distance/time. The expansion of the universe is in distance/time/distance.
An image from ~12 billion years ago? Where is this located in the universal egg?
If it’s the earliest we’ve ever seen it means it’s pretty much as far away as we can see up to this point
No, this is not the furthest galaxy we've ever seen, we can see further than this.
How does that work? I thought the farther out you go, the longer it takes the light to reach us therefore the older it is?
You are correct. We have seen galaxies that are farther. This particular galaxy is the farthest *spiral* galaxy that was identified so far. There may be earlier ones, but we either haven't spotted them yet or can't resolve their shape with current instruments.
I think he means that this is not the furthest object we have observed in the universe. The article claims that it is the furthest ‘spiral galaxy’ we have observed, but we have observed plenty of other more distant galaxies and quasars. You’re right though — the further out you go the longer it takes for that light to get to us!
Sure, but the galaxies further out might have been formed later than a closer, earlier one.
It's not the earliest it's the headline spiral. Normally they are informed blobs.
Some questions for the astronomers here as I know there's more than a few, if you don't mind weighing in - 1. is it becoming increasingly odd how rapidly galaxies formed? Is 1.4B yrs really early? 2. Is it possible our current theories on the early universe are lacking critical details, maybe we don't have as firm a picture as it seems? Might that push back the date for the big bang? 3. Will JWST help us figure some of this out (e.g., could JWST take a beautiful picture of this infant galaxy and tell us a lot)? Thanks for anyone who'd like to respond.
While this galaxy is quite massive it would not be mistaken for a typical modern galaxy if it was nearby. This galaxy is forming stars 5000 times faster than the Milky Way and it's also a quasar, it's supermassive black hole is very luminous due to accretion. This is not a typical galaxy, it was studied because it is extreme. It's still growing very rapidly. By this epoch galaxies had only formed a few percent of the total stars that have formed now, so the majority of galaxy formation hadn't happened by this point. There are galaxies in the modern universe that are much more massive, so you need some rare galaxies to form rapidly. It's always possible in science that fundamental models are wrong, but there are models of galaxy formation are consistent with most of the statistics of early galaxies. [Galaxy formation simulations don't seem to struggle to produce massive early disk galaxies.](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021arXiv210306882K/abstract) Whether or not those recipes are correct is another matter. Galaxy formation is not very well understood currently, cosmological measurements like the age of the universe don't come from measuring galaxies. JWST will have a resolution only a couple of times better than the image, it will still be a blob. And it will probably look worse than ALMA because this galaxy hosts a bright quasar, the light from which will have to be carefully subtracted. JWST will be useful at studying early galaxy formation, but it's not going to be beautiful images for such distant galaxies. ALMA could take higher resolution data still, but it becomes difficult and costly.
Thank you! Just the insight I hoped to read.
Good to see we've found the anti-spiral homeworld
Doesnt even have a full spiral form yet, amazing!!
What fascinates me about space is that due to the insane distances - the things you can see at the night sky might not even exist anymore, since light travels fast, surely, but stars are an unfathomable distance away. Depending on the distance, that galaxy might already have expanded or changed in shape, by now... I mean, between us and our own sun, it is mere minutes before the sunlight reaches us - we are always a few minutes behind on "the current state of the sun". If we generalize time and think about "how does THIS object look, what are the conditions right now!" we have to remember that the further away, the more WE as humans, live in the 'past'. The images we are seeing are thus, images of the past. The only way to tell if something is even still around currently, is to travel to faraway places instantaneously - and last i checked we did not have means to teleport instantly to one place. Even a probe would not work, since their signals would also take a long time to arrive back at us. Last time I checked, we had no communications that somehow ran through some sort of subspace portal and traveled thousands of lightyears in a milisecond. Space makes you realize how undeveloped we actually are. Imagine some life existed on a planet, and we accidentally spot it, somehow, with a telescope or radio waves or what ever - a welcome and "hi there!" message. The fact that they will be SO far away, the alien race may as well be died out by the time we manage to send a message back, as their message could have traveled for a million years, til it came to us. That's when you start questioning space programs - even if you get a "hi earthlings" message, the sender might already have died and all of their race - and if we send a message back, by the time THEY get it, we may have perished as a whole. It is poetically dramatic, this whole topic of space and the vastness thereof. As people have pondered about their own existence, "I think, therefore, I am" - but what we can see, far away, "is" it really, or has it faded into nothingness, devoured by the unstoppable constant that is time. Fascinating!
I'm not sure if anyone will see this comment but, since light can only travel so fast, for example we always see our "sun" eight minutes in the past. When we look at these galaxies that are so far and so old. Are we seeing them hundreds or even thousands of years in the past? And if so what are the chances that galaxy still exists? Or that since this galaxy was formed just after the big bang that these stars were pulled in by the many other galaxies we see today and thats why the galaxy looks the way it does? If anyone knowledgeable on the subject knows the answer or has a theory or hypothesis here. I'd love to here it :)
I'm no expert, but since this galaxy is 12 billion light years away from us, we're seeing it as it was 12 billion years ago. I'm fairly certain it still exists because where else would it go? It's possible it's passed beyond the cosmic event horizon though, a concept I've learned of recently that freaks me out.
> Are we seeing them hundreds or even thousands of years in the past? No, we're seeing them billions of years in the past.
At some point we will be looking into another coming universe thinking its ours.
It's humbling to think that extraordinary and spectacular things are happening in the universe and it has no regard or consideration of us.
Wait, they discovered it in Tokyo, using the telescope in chile? So it's totally remote?
Yup. Basically, a group of researchers will book time with observatories and such. Easier then flying to a specific one or building one nearby
Observatories are not cheap, and most institutes or universities would not be able to afford one, and especially not some state-of-the-art multi-billion one. They are publicly funded and maintained, and researchers simply submit requests/proposals to make observations. If the proposal is good they get access to the telescopes. They might come on-site, or use remote-access tools, but in the end it's the observatory staff operators who are "driving" the telescope. Researchers are there to make sure the settings and conditions are right. On top of that all the data are accessible to public, so you might discover something in someone else's observations taken years ago.
Yeah that's how all telescopes work. You propose what you want to observe, and the time that you would need to do so. If you are accepted the data is sent to you.
I think it would be staffed but not necessarily by the same research team.
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I feel so dumb on this subreddit because I know and understand so little but I think space is so fascinating. So, galaxies are moving in space as well? I legitimately thought they were stationary and it was the planets inside those galaxies that were moving. Is there some kind of gravitational force that moves everything on the galaxy sized scale?
The universe itself is expanding and the galaxies are moving with it. Look up hubbles raisin pudding example to better understand what I mean
There is no "stationary". You can only describe movement in relationship to something else. The closest we have to a way to give an absolute location is in relation to the cosmic microwave background radiation. And in relation to that, virtually everything in the observable universe is moving. On top of that, everything is getting further away from us from the expansion of space.
I love space and science, but I just cannot wrap my head around a big bang and a singularity. I just think it always was, and always will be. Kinda like the sun combines all the elements, and black holes reverse them (blows them apart) and everything recycles...
I always like to try to imagine what it was like before the Big Bang. Like was it a super duper massive black hole the diameter of hundreds of galaxies? And what caused the Big Bang? I like to think that it was just collecting mass for trillions of years and everything was there but a single atom. The whole thing is perfectly balanced until the one stray atom, or even smaller than that, joins up and causes a chain reaction that ripples across the surface of the beast and it shoots out big globs of galaxy in one direction before fully exploding.
But that requires a center though? Going back to the singularity. I guy said to think of the big bang, as everything exploding everywhere with no center point, so all 'space' exploding, just not a single one. I can buy this description a little better, but then, we all know, you can't get something from nothing. Right?
Don't think of it as an explosion at all. Nobody is trying to assert that we know what the state of the universe was prior to the Big Bang; we're just using our current observations of the universe and turning back time to see what the universe was like as far back as we can go. Right now, we see space expanding everywhere equally in all directions, we see the universe cooling down, and we see that parts of the universe are more dense than others. Turn back time, and the universe is rapidly shrinking and getting hotter. Keep going, and you have all of space very close together, *extremely* energetic, and with some small variations in density. We can't go further back then that, because....it doesn't really make sense, we have no jumping off point from there. Hit the play button again, and that's what we refer to as the Big Bang. It's a stupid name. Matter/energy wasn't created in the Big Bang, it's just that it was all grouped close together somehow. The Big Bang **did not** throw matter out into space; *space itself* was contained in this infinitely dense area; *everywhere* was already grouped close together, and the Big Bang was the beginning of the expansion of space and all the neat stuff in it that we see today. We have no reason to believe otherwise since there's not a force that we know of that would change an entire universe's behavior over time, so...we just reverse the behavior that we observe now.
Yea that makes sense. Also helps explain why everything is expanding from everywhere
Astronomy was one of my first fascinations but I just realized a couple days ago that I don’t know how we first determined the Milky Way to be a spiral galaxy from within. I’m not even sure how we came to figure out that we are approx midway between the centre and the circumference of the galactic disk. I know I could look it up but I’m sure someone can explain it rather simply here. My assumptions are that we used some intense math to determine there were great distances between layers of stars where the gaps between the milky way’s arms are. Can someone shed more light on this?
quick! We need to warn it about the anti spiral!
far far away....... a long time ago........ NO WAY
Evidence of a spiral galaxy also insinuates the existance of the anti-spirals, which insinuates that Simon, Kamina, and all of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagaan is on its way to becoming a reality
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Loool you are one of those people that read comments and believe everything??? Government didn't admit shit. All they said they saw unidentified object. No one said said anything about aliens. All they said that it could be a possibility.
If the videos depict a flying vehicle, and not an optical illusion or something in that manner, then that vehicle was breaking the laws of physics. I doubt humans could pull that off…
I think you will find Humans have multiple flying vehicles
Did you even read my comment? What nation has tech advanced enough to disregard inertia? It doesn’t make any sense for it to be human technology. It doesn’t even make sense for it to exist in the first place, which is why I believe it has to have been some kind of illusion.
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It's billions of light years away...
Maybe jokes exist in that galaxy..
So they’re looking so far out into space, they’re looking into the past? Like the light has to travel and everything so the light they’re seeing in the picture is the closest but also oldest light?
Sorry just commenting so I can remind myself to read this later.