Astronomy Picture Of The Day - UCG 12591

Awesome Pic. Thanks.

I wish they would make a telescope that travels like voyager.

originally posted by: 3daysgone
Awesome Pic. Thanks.

I wish they would make a telescope that travels like voyager.

Voyager 1 is only about 17 light HOURS from Earth (that's light hours, not light years. Voyager 2 is only about 16 light HOURS from Earth.

So if a large telescope were on the Voyager 1 spacecraft, it would still see the light from this galaxy as it looked approximately 400 Million years ago...

OR, let's say that the light from this galaxy that reached the Hubble telescope was exactly 400,000,000 years old, then the light that reached Voyager 1 (if the path of Voyager one was toward the direction of that galaxy) would be:

399,999,999 years, 364 days, and 7 hours old.

Not much of a difference.

a reply to: 3daysgone

Well even if we had this Voyager:



I think the journey would still take forever, hehehe.

originally posted by: eriktheawful
a reply to: 3daysgone

Well even if we had this Voyager:

I think the journey would still take forever, hehehe.

OK. Let the Star Trek Geek in me shine through...

Even if we were on THAT Voyager, and that Voyager were stranded in the Delta Quadrant, waaay on the other side of our galaxy, say 75,000 light years away from earth (and 75,000 light years closer to that galaxy pictured in the OP). They would STILL see that light from that galaxy as it looked 399.925 Million years ago (399,925,000 years ago).

So yeah, a bit closer, but not really much closer.

If we were in the Andromeda galaxy looking at another galaxy that was 400 Million light years from Earth, on the other side of the Andromeda galaxy, then it would still be 397-ish Million light years from Andromeda.

As Douglas Adams famously once wrote, "Space is big".

[...And that was the "Hitchhiker's Guide" Geek in me showing through]

Double post.
See above.

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

No, no, you're doing it wrong.

As a Trek Geek, you're suppose to tell us how long it would take to get to UCG 12591 (400 million light years away) at even warp 9.9.

originally posted by: eriktheawful
a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

No, no, you're doing it wrong.

As a Trek Geek, you're suppose to tell us how long it would take to get to UCG 12591 (400 million light years away) at even warp 9.9.

Any good Star Trek Geek would know that the actual speed of various warp factors has never really been unambiguously addressed in Star Trek.

Asking "how long would it take to go 400 million LY moving at warp 9.9?" would be like the Bridgekeeper asking King Arthur "What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

[...and dammit again -- there's that 'Monty Python' Geek in me showing through]

a reply to: intrptr

If you could zoom in on a person three billion light years from here, the image captured would be of that person as they existed three billion years ago.

Then how close would you have to be before they vanished ? Supposedly the light is travelling to us and has been for a long time but when the light goes out there, there has to be a distance its last light can travel . Things that we can no longer see today because their last light passed us at some point in the past . Things that we are looking at now may not really exist today but only their left over light . So how close do we have to be to them before we see them vanish ?

dbp

a reply to: the2ofusr1

Had this really long reply that I made disappear with two wrong key strokes, grrrrrr. hehehe.

Okay, here is sort of an example of what you are talking about:

M1 the Crab Nebula is a nebula that was created by a star exploding. Now, it's 6500 light years away, but Chinese astronomers recorded the exploding star in 1054 AD. For us, that explosion happened 963 years ago, but in reality it happened about 7643 years ago, it just took the light 6500 years to get here for us to see it.

Now, the star itself is gone. No longer there, so we can't see it anymore, the light from the star has now finished passing us, and when it exploded, it (the star) stopped sending light this way. Now, instead we have a very beautiful looking nebula there.

Is there anyway to still see the star?

Yes! There are 2 ways for us to still see the star.

1) Get a time machine and go back in time before 1054 AD. When you look where M1 is, you'll see a star instead.

or

2) Get a FTL ship, and go in the opposite direction away from M1 for at least 963 light years. If you stop and look towards M1, you'll see a star instead, because you caught up to the last of the light being emitted from it. Stick around long enough, and you'll get to see the same explosion that the Chinese astronomers saw.

So yes, if an object stops sending the light, or something like that, at some point the last of it will reach here, and we won't see it anymore. But that last light of it will continue to travel across the universe.

originally posted by: the2ofusr1
a reply to: intrptr

If you could zoom in on a person three billion light years from here, the image captured would be of that person as they existed three billion years ago.

Then how close would you have to be before they vanished ? Supposedly the light is travelling to us and has been for a long time but when the light goes out there, there has to be a distance its last light can travel . Things that we can no longer see today because their last light passed us at some point in the past . Things that we are looking at now may not really exist today but only their left over light . So how close do we have to be to them before we see them vanish ?

The light that travels to the telescope is what is being magnified, not the actual object itself. The actual object itself has moved considerably since then.

Look at the image in the OP again. See it four hundred million years ago, right now.

A simpler way to look at this is to see a sunrise. The sun you see peek over the horizon as it comes up is really eight minutes ahead of where you see it. It rose 8 minutes ago, only now becoming visible to us watching on earth.

If that helps.

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

That post was funnier than hell...

Any good Star Trek Geek would know that the actual speed of various warp factors has never really been unambiguously addressed in Star Trek.

But makes for good counting drama on screen. Warp six, warp seven, warp eight...!!!

Scott: Keptin, I dunno how much moor she kin tike.

Warp nine... Warp ten!!!

Cut to picture of ship streaking by (lol)

Even better...

a reply to: eriktheawful

Heres our paradox, the movie has been released before they are done making it.

a reply to: the2ofusr1

Does light travel to the center of the universe or out ? If the outer bounds of the universe is 14 billion LY away from Earth ,does that make Earth the center of the Universe ?

The center of the universe is relative. We are the center of the universe from our point of view because we can only see so far back into time in each direction we look. In fact; once we reach about 15 Billion light years, then we can no longer make out galaxies or other similar features but rather the blobs of energy/light out that far are referred to as Quasars (also one of my favourite comic characters from back in the day). However; if you were to be on a planet located within a galaxy which is seen from Earth as a Quasar, then the Milky Way Galaxy would e seen to you as a Quasar its own self.

As for how to see in real time the images from another system or galaxy. In theory it is quite simple, in actuality it still escapes the grasp of human kind. You would have to bend space.


Gorgeous picture by the way.

originally posted by: TamtammyMacx
I've probably asked this before. If it is 400 million light years away, do we have a way to pinpoint where it is currently in the celestial sky. Or is it basically in the same spot. For any object that far away, do we really know exactly where it is currently?

Yes, I am quite sure that someone out there has a supercomputer doing the computations to constantly update the theoretical movements of interstellar bodies and where they may be today as projected through math and current movements of all known bodies in the known universe.

The biggest problem would be extrapolating unknown variables of data such as novas, super novas, comets, dark matter, quasars, etc... to an acceptable degree. Although, through the same algorithms stated above, they may be able to somewhat un-scientifically and probably inaccurately attempt to predict these types of events in the future/past.

There you go. Plain as mud eh? Or you confused yet, because I am?

a reply to: Soylent Green Is People

Any good Star Trek Geek would know that the actual speed of various warp factors has never really been unambiguously addressed in Star Trek. Asking "how long would it take to go 400 million LY moving at warp 9.9?" would be like the Bridgekeeper asking King Arthur "What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" [...and dammit again -- there's that 'Monty Python' Geek in me showing through]

ahem . . . from Voy: The 37s . . . Warp 9.9 would take you roughly 0.0007 lightyears in under a second, so my answer is ummmm, well the math is beyond me. However at warp 9.975 you can go 40 ly in 5 days so . . . 50 Million days for 400m ly, and thus around 137 k years to reach said distance at Warp 9.975. I think????????? Ugh, my brain hurts now.

But more importantly . . . What do you mean? An African or a European Swallow?

A very long time ago, in the late 1970s as a kid, I had the Star Trek manual. In it, it had a graph showing Warp Speed.

Warp 1 was twice the speed of light. Warp 2 was 4 times. Warp 3 was 8 times, Warp 4 16 times, and so on.

Many years later in the 1990s, I was part of a discussion group. They take things like this deadly serious, and put some serious math behind it. What made the group special was some of these guys had degrees in physics. Was a rather wild ride. Their favorite form of entertainment was to go in and pick apart Star Trek TNG episodes as to what would work, and what would not.

When it came to Warp Speed, they came up with a system that works a lot like actual light speed. Technically, with the way we know physics work, we (matter) can not actually get up to 100 percent light speed because of how much energy it would take. You will always fall short, but you could get up to many millionths of a point to it: 99.9999999999999%, etc, etc. But you could never get to 100.

Now, they came up with the idea of Warp 10 with the definition of: instant travel. Warp 10 would be instantly there. The idea was that it would be something that could not be achieved even with a perfect energy converter (anti-matter drive). So what you would have is: Warp 9.0, 9.1, 9.2....up to 9.9, then 9.91, 9.92, etc, with the curve growing more and more.

This was actually played out in a few Star Trek episodes of different shows like that.

Go Geek Power, right? hehehe.

S & F to you sir, I haven't been on APOD in years and now you have me looking through archives all over again great post man!

Wow ...

a reply to: JDeLattre89

The center of the universe is relative. We are the center of the universe from our point of view because we can only see so far back into time in each direction we look.

Are we the youngest or the oldest point in the universe ?