Record Broken: Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen

[Waspie_Dwarf]

Record Broken: Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen

Quote

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang – the farthest individual star ever seen to date.

The find is a huge leap further back in time from the previous single-star record holder; detected by Hubble in 2018. That star existed when the universe was about 4 billion years old, or 30 percent of its current age, at a time that astronomers refer to as “redshift 1.5.” Scientists use the word “redshift” because as the universe expands, light from distant objects is stretched or “shifted” to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels toward us.

Read More: NASA

 

[lightly]

“Redshift” happens, simply because  red light/waves travel  farthest?  They are the longest waves in the visible light spectrum?      

Edited March 30, 2022 by lightly

[Waspie_Dwarf]

27 minutes ago, lightly said:

“Redshift” happens, simply because  red light/waves travel  farthest?

Redshift is a change in the frequency of light towards the red end of the spectrum. It is caused by the velocity change of an object moving away from us (an object moving toward us has it's light blueshifted. It's a Doppler effect. Think of the way the sound frequency of a police car siren changes as the car first rushes towards you and then away from you, red and blueshift are the same effect but with light rather than sound.

Because of the Big Bang, the universe is expanding. The further away the object is the faster it seems to be rushing away from us and hence the more redshifed the light is. By measuring the colour an object appears, and knowing what colour it actually is the redshift can be calculated. Knowning the redshift allows you to know the velocity and therefore the distance of that object.

36 minutes ago, lightly said:

They are the longest waves in the visible light spectrum?      

The visible light spectrum is irrelevant here, it is a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum ans is simply the result of limitation of the human eyes. Distant astronomical objects can be red shifted well beyond the visible spectrum and into the infrared. This is why the James Webb Space Telescope is not designed for the visible spectrum, but the red, and infrared wavelengths, so that it can observe the most distant objects in the observable universe,

[lightly]

Ahhh,  thanks Waspie-

[Eldorado]

The far-away star system takes the official name WHL0137-LS, but the astronomers who found it nicknamed it “Earendel” from the Old English word meaning “morning star” or “rising light.”

Earendel system as we’re seeing it today was shining within just 900 million years of the Big Bang, according to the authors of a new paper in the journal Nature describing the discovery.

Fully 12.8 billion years passed before that light reached the Hubble Space Telescope, magnified by a lucky trick of gravity to appear as a tiny smudge of photons on Hubble’s image sensor. Earendel is 8.2 billion years older than the Sun and Earth and 12.1 billion years older than our planet’s first animals.

MSN

[bookwormwen]

What a fascinating discovery. I'm constantly astounded by how immense the universe is and how miniscule we are in comparison. It's a humbling and comforting thing.

[brokenbutcher2016]

Whats really mind blowing is what was once thought to be stars splattered across the sky are mostly Galaxies. They look like someone tossed a million record albums up in the air and snapped a fast pic...Im not sure the numbers and vastness can even be comprehended by our tiny little ass's...

[jethrofloyd]

Even if I ran so far away from my wife, she would find me there. 

[Trelane]

Ah Earendil, now we must hear his song....

[Waspie_Dwarf]

6 hours ago, brokenbutcher2016 said:

Whats really mind blowing is what was once thought to be stars splattered across the sky are mostly Galaxies..

This simply isn't correct.

When you go out at night and look at those objects that look like stars what you are actually seeing are... stars.

Excluding the Milky Way (which we are inside), but including the Magellanic Clouds, which are satellites of the Milky Way, there are only 7 naked eye galaxies. Not only are we mostly seeing stars but we are seeing close by stars. The furthest naked eye star discernable as an individual object is about 4,000 light years away.

With the exception of those previously mentioned,  galaxies were not  visible at all before the invention of the telescope. Then the debate was whether they were nebulae, structures of dust and gas within our own galaxy or, "islands of stars" external to it. Edwin Hubbled showed them to be individual, separate galaxies in 1924 ( although the results weren't published in a peer reviewed paper until 1929.

Maybe it's the Hubble Deep Field Image you are thinking of. Taken in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope  it shows more than 3,000 star like points of light, almost all of which are distant galaxies. Those objects were never mistaken for stars, indeed the tiny area of sky which this image focuses on was specifically chosen because it contain almost no stars. What it did show was just how numerous faint, distant galaxies are.

[sanescotty]

Will that star actually still be there now?

after all, 12 billion years have gone by since the image we are seeing. 

[pallidin]

5 hours ago, sanescotty said:

Will that star actually still be there now?

after all, 12 billion years have gone by since the image we are seeing. 

No.

[lightly]

56 minutes ago, pallidin said:

No.

Wow!    But, I suppose there are many new stars whose light hasn’t reached us yet !? 

[pallidin]

7 minutes ago, lightly said:

Wow!    But, I suppose there are many new stars whose light hasn’t reached us yet !? 

Sure. Good thinking. You're spot on. Our universe and all it's complexities and constraints truly is a wonderful thing, to me anyway.

[Waspie_Dwarf]

6 hours ago, sanescotty said:

after all, 12 billion years have gone by since the image we are seeing. 

12 billion years have not gone by since the image we are seeing, 12 billion years have passed since the light from that star was emitted, these are not quite the same things. It's all about your point of view. Rather like hearing a distant explosion, it is totally irrelevant, from your point of view when that sound was generated, when you hear it, it is NOW from your point of view. Someone closer to that explosion will already have heard it, someone further away will hear it later, These other points of view are totally irrelevant to you as you can not experience them, It's the same with this  image, it is NOW from our point of view, You can only make an image when  the light arrives. This is kind of the point of Relativity, how you experience something depends on where you are.

 

6 hours ago, sanescotty said:

Will that star actually still be there now?

It's a high mass star. The higher the mass of the star the shorter the life span, so it probably had a life span measured in millions, not billions of years, so pallidin's rather succinct reply is correct. However, even if it had been a low mass star, and would have a life span measured in the tens of billions of years it still would, arguably, not be there. Because the universe is expanding it would be far more distant than this observation. Once again though, from our point of view, that's irrelevant.

[NCC1701]

If we want to communicate with alien civilizations on that distance we will need a whole new way of data transfer, so we don't have to wait for another 12.9 bln years to get an answer. We want an answer right away.

[Waspie_Dwarf]

2 hours ago, NCC1701 said:

If we want to communicate with alien civilizations on that distance we will need a whole new way of data transfer, so we don't have to wait for another 12.9 bln years to get an answer. We want an answer right away.

Except that we already have the answer... it can't be done. Special Relatively prohibits superluminal communication.

Besides, it wouldn't take 12.9 billion years to get an answer... it would take 25.8 billion years. It would take 12.9 billion years just for the other civilization to receive the question.

[lightly]

On 4/1/2022 at 11:52 AM, lightly said:

Wow!    But, I suppose there are many new stars whose light hasn’t reached us yet !? 

I further suppose that the light from most new stars will  never  reach earth…because expansion will  outpace  it.?

    …I gotta study “the Doppler effect”… it’s still hard for me to accept that the light ,or siren sound, actually changes?  or “shifts” …rather than  Relatively.  ..from our perspective or position.  

Edited April 2, 2022 by lightly

[+joc]

Perhaps a silly question but...is it possible to eventually actually see the theoretical Big Bang?

[Occupational Hubris]

3 hours ago, joc said:

Perhaps a silly question but...is it possible to eventually actually see the theoretical Big Bang?

Not really. For the first 100-300k years after the BB everything was still so densely packed that all matter was ionized and the universe was opaque. It wasn't until things cooled enough that light as we know it was able to start traveling around during the era of re-combination. We can see this as the cosmic background radiation.  

 

Edited April 4, 2022 by Occupational Hubris

[Ghost Ship]

Will it be possible for Webb to see the very first stars?

[lightly]

Describing it as “ the Farthest star ever seen is confusing to me. (big surprise huh?:) ..  farthest from HERE? Yes.    …as if HERE is the center of the Universe.   ?     It isn’t.  Any point within the universe is the center ,and here.  !?!    Because, the universe doesn’t expand from a center point… it expands at every point, Everywhere!      And so, of course there are, and were,  and will be, trillions of     farther  undetected stars .

[Occupational Hubris]

2 hours ago, lightly said:

Describing it as “ the Farthest star ever seen is confusing to me. (big surprise huh?:) ..  farthest from HERE? Yes.    …as if HERE is the center of the Universe.   ?     It isn’t.  Any point within the universe is the center ,and here.  !?!    Because, the universe doesn’t expand from a center point… it expands at every point, Everywhere!      And so, of course there are, and were,  and will be, trillions of     farther  undetected stars .

There will always be things further than our light cones allows us to see. It is correct to say that it's the furthers we've seen, because it is. 

[sanescotty]

Thanks for your answers. I have another question which has nagged me for a long time. 
If you travelled AWAY from the Earth at light speed, would the Earth never seem to get distant as you are matching the speed at which light travels, therefore keeping pace with the same ‘image’ , as it were. 
Thnks in advance. 

[lightly]

8 hours ago, sanescotty said:

Thanks for your answers. I have another question which has nagged me for a long time. 
If you travelled AWAY from the Earth at light speed, would the Earth never seem to get distant as you are matching the speed at which light travels, therefore keeping pace with the same ‘image’ , as it were. 
Thnks in advance. 

  I googled it for you… and learned that the earth would be visible from about 9 billion miles away (as a speck of light)

so….the speed of light being 186,000 miles per second..     if we divide 9 billion miles by 186,000 mps = about 484 seconds = 8+ minutes.

       So..if you travelled AWAY from the earth ,at the speed of light, …it would fade from view in just over 8 minutes .

           (someone should double check my ‘calculations’ however)