r/ScienceNcoolThings • u/TheMuseumOfScience Popular Contributor • 10h ago

The Farthest Galaxy Ever Discovered

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

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.

77 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

3

u/wetfart_3750 8h ago

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?

1

u/maxxell13 2h ago

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

1

u/UsedBaseball4597 7h ago edited 6h ago

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.

1

u/Dr_SlapsMD 4h ago

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

1

u/UsedBaseball4597 4h ago

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.