Most Distant Object in Universe Spotted?

Most Distant Object in Universe Spotted?

www.hindu.com

London (PTI): Astronomers have claimed that a self-destructing star that exploded 13.1 billion light years from Earth and spotted by NASA recently, is the most distant object yet confirmed in the universe. The object is a gamma-ray burst (GRB) -- the brightest type of stellar explosion. It detonated some 640 million years after the big bang, around the end of the cosmic "dark ages", when the first stars and galaxies were lighting up space, the 'New Scientist' reported...

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www.newscientist.com
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While this story mentions that a number of objects (including galaxies) have been discovered much more distant than this GRB, this thing is the only one that is confirmed by all observers as "most distant"...

Which is puzzling to me. Why do you think the other "most distant" objects are not confirmed? This story claims that the other "most distant" object sightings are based on "ambiguous" data. But I'm wondering if those object sightings actually predate the accepted age of the Universe, and that's why they're not confirmed.

Could this be another case of Science excluding or invalidating data that contradicts accepted Scientific dogma?

And here's another annoying little item... Below is the actual enhanced photo of the Gamma Ray Burst reported today:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/f0bccbfa0e8e.jpg[/atsimg]

However, many news outlets are attaching the below photo to this story:

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/830e919078d2.jpg[/atsimg]

This second photo is an arbitrary shot of a gas jet in Orion, which has nothing to do with the GRB story. Apparently, our "objective" news media prefer a more colorful photo, even though it is completely unrelated.


— Doc Velocity

www.hindu.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Interesting...and it's taken THAT LONG for the light/radiation from the explosion to reach our little blue orb in the sky...

It's interesting that this story makes absolutely no sense to me
am I the only one?

light moves at the speed of light, and we find this out now?
plus how can an explosion last that long?

is that far away place in another space time continuum?

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
light moves at the speed of light, and we find this out now?
plus how can an explosion last that long?

The explosion occurred 600 million years after the big bang. It no longer exists, what we are seeing is the time-delayed light from that explosion finally reaching our planet billions of years later due to the fact that light can only travel at a certain speed.

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
It's interesting that this story makes absolutely no sense to me
am I the only one?

light moves at the speed of light, and we find this out now?
plus how can an explosion last that long?

is that far away place in another space time continuum?

Light moves at the speed of light. The speed of light is ~300,000 Km per second. Therefore an event that occurs 300,000 Km away will be visible to us after one second.

Our own sun is 149,600,000 Km away from Earth. So light from the sun takes about 8.5 minutes to reach Earth. If the sun were to blow up we wouldn't know about it until 8.5 minutes after it happened.

The nearest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, and that's 4.5 light years away. So if that blew up now we'd see it happening in late 2013.

So this actually happened 13.1 billion years ago, but it's only now that we're seeing the light from it as that's how long it's taken the light to travel here.

[edit on 28-4-2009 by mattpryor]

Originally posted by Kryties

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
light moves at the speed of light, and we find this out now?
plus how can an explosion last that long?

The explosion occurred 600 million years after the big bang. It no longer exists, what we are seeing is the time-delayed light from that explosion finally reaching our planet billions of years later due to the fact that light can only travel at a certain speed.

I think that's his point.

When we see an explosion it happens over a few seconds to a few minutes before the light travels in a direction out of sight.

He's asking why has the light not disappeared if it exploded it should only be visible for a short period but you can't say because it's so far away because if that's the case we would not have seen it yet.

If the light arrived to our eyes then it should only last as long as the explosion. The fact is that the light is seen by telescopes and not our eyes per say. So I would assume the argument would be that it is because the light has not actually reached us and may never reach us but at the same time it had to because the telescope even the hubble is within a reasonable range of the visible light to see it. Therefor we should only see the explosion as it happened and then nothing in that spot. Now maybe they are tracking the light as it moves through the universe and it's not stationary I don't know.

Needless to say I have something to think about now but I think that's what he meant.

both of your points understood
the time it would take for it to reach here is understood
but how can it last this long?

if the explosion doesn't exist anymore, then how can we see it now?

any links I can read more about this time-delayed effect?

Originally posted by DarthoriousIf the light arrived to our eyes then it should only last as long as the explosion.

Precisely
how can the explosion no longer exist but still exist?
If we can see it now, then it must exist
but it doesn't, it happened ages ago

if the sun explodes we'd find out a little later
but we would find out because it's not that distant and the sun is huge

but a star that far, during the course of the explosion still being active it would have died out before reaching our sights.
Either way we should not be able to see anything today

[edit on 28-4-2009 by ModernAcademia]

Originally posted by Darthorious

If the light arrived to our eyes then it should only last as long as the explosion.

Quite correct, but you are forgetting the fact that a stellar explosion of this magnitude would last at least a million years itself.

So, the explosion occurred 13.5 billion light years away and the light from that took 13.5 billion years to reach us. The explosion lasts say 1 million years so therefore the light from this explosion could be said to be viewed from Earth for 1 million years before we then see the after-effects and the dissipation.

reply to post by Kryties


I find that VERY hard to believe
an explosion that lasts that long I cannot fathom

Originally posted by Kryties

Originally posted by Darthorious

If the light arrived to our eyes then it should only last as long as the explosion.

Quite correct, but you are forgetting the fact that a stellar explosion of this magnitude would last at least a million years itself.

So, the explosion occurred 13.5 billion light years away and the light from that took 13.5 billion years to reach us. The explosion lasts say 1 million years so therefore the light from this explosion could be said to be viewed from Earth for 1 million years before we then see the after-effects and the dissipation.

It just occured to me that if it did explode and we could isolate and track one tiny piece of light traveling away from it and measure after a time the exact distance it traveled we could calculate it's actual distance from us. Of course the earth's wobble and spin might make the calculation a little off but would be really interested in results like that.

Never occurred to me the explosion could actually last that long.

This is probably why we haven't heared other alien civilisations murmering. By the time their signals get here they're possibly extinct.. and by the time they hear us our planet will probably be just a cinder. Imo space travel and communications would need to be inter-dimentional to be viable.

(I know what I mean at least. )

[edit on 28-4-2009 by riley]

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
reply to post by Kryties

 

I find that VERY hard to believe
an explosion that lasts that long I cannot fathom

You may find it hard to believe, but it is true. You are not thinking on a universal scale, your mind is having trouble conceiving such an enormous event.

Think about the Big Bang. That was the first explosion in the history of history. The Big Bang itself is technically still going, being that our universe is still expanding exponentially. This stellar explosion is like the Big Bang, just on a smaller scale but still infinately larger than anything we could ever imagine. The star that exploded would have been 100 times the size of our Sun, at the very least.

A good way to attempt to wrap ones mind around the size of the universe, and therefore the fact that a stellar explosion can be so large, is to look at this picture called the Hubble Deep Field image. It is an image taken over an 11 day period staring at one miniscule section of the night sky and displayed tens of thousands of galaxies. This is a very humbling image and shows just how infinately small we are in this enormous universe.

Yeah this is kind of strange. It happened 640 million years after the big bang. as if they have a time that hapened.

Okay, then let me ask you a mathematical question

The star exploded 13.1 billion light years from Earth
It detonated some 640 million year

Would you agree that an explosion only lasts as long as there is something to explode?

Take a building as an example, once the building is completely destroyed there's nothing left to allow an explosion to continue, correct?

So with that in mind, how long did the explosion last?

reply to post by ModernAcademia


No...we're just seeing (light of) the explosion now. What is there currently could be completely different. Perhaps a blackhole or something.

[edit on 28-4-2009 by riley]

reply to post by riley


a black hole would have sucked up the light
a black hole can bend light because it's trying to suck it in

EDIT: Unless you meant it turned into one

[edit on 28-4-2009 by ModernAcademia]

Actually Gamma Ray Bursts last about 2 seconds...

Light is energy, and energy doesn't just 'die out'. The light from the explosion would only be seen in our sky for 2 seconds; however the energy produced by a GRB (which is almost as powerful a the original big bang) will go on and on forever unless something converts the light into a different type of energy.

The GRB creates an infrared echo due to the extreme heat and power emitted by the star. This echo is how the scientists confirmed the object. It wasn't confirmed on the actual visible part of the light spectrum. Imagine if you were walking in a field and you saw a bomb go off in the distance. You run and gather your friends and while they didn't see the actual flash like you did, they can confirm the event by witnessing the smoke that emits from the fires it caused.

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
reply to post by riley

 

a black hole would have sucked up the light
a black hole can bend light because it's trying to suck it in

Alright..

It would now but when it was exploding back then (which is what we're currently seeing) the black hole wasn't even in existence yet so couldn't suck in that light.

It would be sucking in light from it's own past before it existed. Black holes suck in light.. not time (though inside black holes may be a different matter.. pardon the pun. )

[edit on 28-4-2009 by riley]

Originally posted by ModernAcademia
Would you agree that an explosion only lasts as long as there is something to explode?

Yes. You are correct.

Take a building as an example, once the building is completely destroyed there's nothing left to allow an explosion to continue, correct?

So with that in mind, how long did the explosion last?

A Star is infinately larger than a building, and the forces that are used in the explosion of a star are much different than what is used to explode a buildng. A Star, for instance, has immense gravity and an all-in mix of just about every element known to exist all exploding at the same time, being distorted and magnified by the gravity of the star itself.

The explosion in question here was a star most likely hundreds of times the size of our own, perhaps even millions of times larger. Now while a smaller star, like our own, may present signs of an explosion for a few years after the event, this is magnified exponentially by the size of the star that exploded.

Now while I may have been a little wild in my guesstimation of how long the light from the explosion would last, I still hold to the fact that it lasts a very long time and is not an "instant" kind of explosion one would see if a building went kaboom.

Interesting fact:

The earliest recorded supernova, SN 185, was recorded by Chinese astronomers in the year 352 AD and was clearly visible in the night sky for a period of over 8 months.