Picture this: A light wave leaves its source 13.2 billion light-years ago, it travels that distance to manage to reflect into the Hubble space craft's lens just in time for it to snap a picture. Seems kind of amazing just thinking of a light wave traveling that distance alone. Now add in the fact that light source was a galaxy. NASA scientists believe the new-found galaxy is one of the oldest in the universe and is one of the farthest away from ours.
As seen in the image below, the new galaxy appears as a red dot. This suggests that the galaxy is far away. Distant objects appear red because their light waves are stretched and become longer and in the red spectrum of light waves. This is due to the universe constantly expanding.
 |
| Look close, the red dot is a new galaxy discovery of the Hubble space craft. |
The article points out that the Hubble space craft is now 3X more powerful than it was before, and took 111 orbits or 8 days of observation to snap the infrared image that contained the new galaxy.
No comments:
Post a Comment