This article was on CNN's web page.
"Astronomers peering across the universe have spotted the most distant
quasar ever observed, an object 26 billion light-years away, researchers
said on Thursday.
This quasar, confirmed as the most faraway object by scientists working
with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, probably started sending its light in
Earth's direction when the universe was less than a billion years old, the
researchers said in a statement.
The universe is thought to be about 14 billion years old now, give or take
a couple billion years. And it has been expanding since the theoretical Big
Bang that started it all. Quasars are extremely bright but extremely
compact objects thought to be powered by matter-sucking black holes as
massive as a billion suns.
Michael Turner, a spokesman for the Survey at the University of Chicago,
said this means that the quasar is about 26 billion light-years away now,
but because of the expansion of the universe, it used to be a lot closer."
(Yeah, like next right door at the inception.)
"When it emitted the light, it was only about 4 billion light-years from
the space in the universe where Earth would be eventually," Turner said in
a telephone interview. "It's only when we talk about the most distant
objects that we have to take the expansion of the universe into account."
"A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion
miles (10 trillion km). Another way to think about cosmic distances and
ages is to determine how bent the light gets as the universe expands. The
more bent it gets to the red end of the spectrum, the older the object is
determined to be. This is known as redshift.
This newly observed object has a redshift of 5.8, the highest ever
measured. It is in fact too red to be seen by the human eye, even with the
most sophisticated equipment. But it was observed through data gathered by
the Sky Survey last month, and scientists confirmed its distance last week."
Okay, so how can two material objects - that quasar and this earth - in a
14 billion year old universe (give or take two) get 26 billion light years
apart? Neither of us can travel at anything like light speed! Am I
missing something?
Dick Fischer - The Origins Solution - www.orisol.com
"The answer we should have known about 150 years ago."
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