Astronomers confirm star system 13.2 billion light-years away is the most distant
 

http://www.popsci.com/sites/popsci.c...?itok=FmERfeUN


The most distant galaxy in the universe is 13.2 billion light-years away and was formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang, it has been revealed.

A team of Caltech researchers that has spent years searching for the earliest objects in the universe has unveiled their latest find.

Researchers say a galaxy called EGS8p7 that is more than 13.2 billion years old, while the universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old.


Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was a soup of charged particles--electrons and protons--and light (photons). Because these photons were scattered by free electrons, the early universe could not transmit light.
By 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe had cooled enough for free electrons and protons to combine into neutral hydrogen atoms that filled the universe, allowing light to travel through the cosmos.
Then, when the universe was just a half-billion to a billion years old, the first galaxies turned on and reionized the neutral gas.
The universe remains ionized today.

Prior to reionization, however, clouds of neutral hydrogen atoms would have absorbed certain radiation emitted by young, newly forming galaxies, including the so-called Lyman-alpha line, the spectral signature of hot hydrogen gas that has been heated by ultraviolet emission from new stars, and a commonly used indicator of star formation.
Because of this absorption, it should not, in theory, have been possible to observe a Lyman-alpha line from EGS8p7.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...-universe.html

Some of the comments are interesting to contemplate:


Then logically, there are races BILLIONS of years ahead of us. Imagine the technology - well no we can't yet. But consider it a humbling reminder next time you scoff at the notion that UFOs, indeed 'Flying Saucers' are not real. They are. I just hope the appalling evil spread by a certain religion does not motivate them to disinfect the entire rest of the Human Race away from the face of this planet.

and

For complex life you need population 0 or 1 stars (The Sun is pop 1), for simple life population 2 should be fine but at 13.2 billions years old they will be population 3 stars and completely unable to support any life. However the oldest population 1 stars are about 10 billion years old (most are less than 8 billion) and the solar system is about 4.5 billion years old, so there is a huge time period for life to have appeared and disappeared. We really do not know enough to give even a ball park figure on the likelyhood of intelligent aliens evolving as there are too many variables that are nothing more than guess work


:think:

The likelihood of there being other intelligent life in the universe - even in our galaxy - is pretty much a certainty in my opinion. Even if the likelihood in any one solar system is miniscule, the sorts of numbers we're talking about make it near certain that the universe is currently, and has been in the past, teaming with life. Basically the only real possibilities were lots of life, or no life at all... And we know that life does exist, because... Well... Here we are. Festering away on our smelly little pebble, hurtling through space :joker:

yes the fact that we are here is the clincher really, that and time and materials

Wow... God's clever, isn't he. *grin*

Of Course
Thats why a 10 year old boy should be sent up there
by the time he reaches them he will be 50
and the Computer would have fully educated him.

He also has really big hands. And you know what they say about guys with big hands...

They make better pianists?

I was going to say they make good bass players but that'll do I guess.

Though to be fair, God strikes me as a drummer. A bit mental, unpredictable, and likely to trash the hotel.

LOL...

Piers Morgan could live there and it'd still be too close.

Arista why do you want to send ten years old boys into space?

I've had arguments with extremely unintelligent people on this subject. I find it remarkable that someone can turn around and outright deny that there is life other than us in the universe.

To give them zero G training to disarm nukes in vans and to learn how to ride robot dogs on the moon for use when all students are drafted to fight WW3.

Obviously.

Or wait... How does arista know that the nearest planet with intelligent life is 40 light-years away? There's only one explanation... They sent arista here when he was 10 and it took him 40 years to reach earth!

Because it takes 40 years to get there

I am also of the opinion that more life in our universe is almost inevitable.Unfortunately we can't travel to a system or galaxy even 10 light years away....Since we can't travel at the speed of light.
Imagine if we are the only life in our universe though.That is a weird and scary thought.Only us in this unimaginably vast space.Unlikely though i think.If it happened once the probability is that it's happened before or after.
Imagine if it's a multiverse and there's only one system with life per universe?The possibilities are endless since we actually know close to nothing.

This is the most distant star now - to the extent of their current knowledge and their technology.

I find stuff like this fascinating.

It's beautiful. anything that reminds everyone how ****ing small and in significant they are is good. The fact is the light that reaching our cameras now to show us these star systems, is from before human beings even existed as a species.

It;s important for humans to realize what tiny small things we are.

we are all going to die and anything we did will mean nothing in 100, 200, 1000, 50,000, 1 million years from now. it all means nothing.

so chill the **** out and enjoy it.

True, as a guess I'd say it's quite unlikely that there's just one "universe" too. There's probably another level where each universe is like a star and there are billions of universes making up some bigger cluster...

it;s also likely then that there is a much greater consciousness made up of these universes that we cannot comprehend. in the same way that our atoms cannot comprehend how small they are and that they much up mach larger beings that have their own consciousness.

It's scary and awe-inspiring and insanely HUGE.

Our universes are just as small as atoms to much larger mechanisms, it's crazy.