Week in Geek - A galaxy far, far away
This image shows the position of the most distant galaxy discovered so far within a deep sky Hubble Space Telescope survey called GOODS North (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North). Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Oesch (Yale University)
My weekly post for The Rachel Maddow Show.
Week in Geek: A galaxy far, far away edition
Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have detected the most distant galaxy to date, a mere 400 million years after the Big Bang.
The galaxy is “creatively” named GN-z11 because it is located in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) north field, hence the “GN” and because it is located at a redshift (z) of ~11. There are two types of redshift: Doppler and cosmological, this is the latter - it’s a logarithmic distance scale based on the expansion of the universe. For reference, our nearest neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy, while over 2.5 million light years away, is only at redshift of ~0.001001. So redshift of 11 is pretty darn far to say the least. The previous record holder for most distant galaxy discovered was z = 8.6.
Read the full article here.
