Naked Science Forum

Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: Aaron Ring on 23/01/2011 23:11:51

Title: What is the farthest known object in space?
Post by: Aaron Ring on 23/01/2011 23:11:51

I'm new to astronomy and have a lot of interest in it. It truly blows my mind to even try and comprehend certain aspects of space. The picture from Hubble of the Ultra deep field is one such image.

My question is, what is the farthest known object to us?  Do we have a picture of it? Do we know anything about it?

I love the Naked Scientists (Fan from the US) and many, many of these topics on this forum are outstanding.  I apologize if this has already been discussed, but I couldnt locate anything with the search field.

Thanks

Aaron
California

Title: What is the farthest known object in space?
Post by: Soul Surfer on 23/01/2011 23:36:42

The farthest known object is the surface of the universe when it fell to the temperature and density similar to the surface of a star and became transparent this started of at a few thousand degrees K and has been expanded more than one thousand times to be the 3degree K cosmic microwave background.  It is extremely even in all directions. and is around 13and a bit billion years into the past.

If you insist on a specific object this reference     http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/galaxy-is-most-distant-object-ev.html   gives details and a quotation from it is given below.

"Astronomers have measured the distance to the farthest cosmic object known to humankind: a galaxy that lies 13.1 billion light-years away. Imaged last year by Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3, the galaxy takes researchers back to a mere 600 million years after the big bang. Not only does it smash the previous record for most distant object—a gamma-ray burst that went off 13 billion years ago—but it is also the first object to be detected from an era when the universe was just emerging from an opaque veil of hydrogen gas."

"A few hundred thousand years after the big bang, protons and electrons started joining together to form hydrogen. About 150 million years later, the first stars and galaxies began to form, but they remained enveloped in a fog of hydrogen gas which absorbed the light emitted by the earliest stars. Over the next several hundred million years—until the universe was 800 hundred million years old—the radiation from these early stars and galaxies split the surrounding hydrogen into protons and electrons, thus clearing away the fog and making the universe transparent. Researchers call this period the epoch of reionization."

Title: What is the farthest known object in space?
Post by: CliffordK on 23/01/2011 23:54:10

Thanks,
My other question was going to be whether it counted that the previous "record" was held by the observation of the explosion of an object....  which then would no longer exist   [xx(]

Of course, that Galaxy would also have evolved in the past 13.1 Billion Years.