“I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
How Scientists Will Break The Record For Most Distant Galaxy Ever
“Without the ability to survey the entire sky, however, we’re extremely likely to break the current record, but not to set the ultimate, all-time, never-to-be-broken record for most distant galaxy. Even with the advanced capabilities of our next-generation space telescope, NASA’s James Webb will be able to look back to about 200-250 million years after the Big Bang: an improvement that basically halves the time since the Big Bang that Hubble can observe.
But the very first stars, star clusters, and early galaxies that form should arise even earlier than that. There’s so much intervening matter that not even Webb will be able to peer through it. There is, however a potential signal that can arise: the 21-centimeter radiation that gets emitted when stars form, matter gets ionized, and then those ions recombine to form neutral hydrogen. This radiation could, in principle, be observed by a low-frequency radio telescope array on the far side of the Moon. Our frontiers of the unknown may be always receding, but it’s up to us to keep pushing them. Only by continuing to search beyond what is presently known can we hope to discover what’s truly out there in our Universe.”
The most distant galaxy we’ve ever found, GN-z11, was revealed by Hubble in 2016, and remains the farthest individual object we’ve ever observed. Its light comes to us from a distance of 32 billion light-years away, and was emitted just 400 million years after the Big Bang: when the Universe was just 3% of its current age. In the coming years, NASA’s James Webb will shatter that record, taking us back twice as far towards the Big Bang: to galaxies as young as 200-250 million years after the Big Bang.
A rescued plover chick sports some stylish leg bands behind the scenes at the Aquarium. Researchers can use the bands to identify and track these threatened shorebirds once they’re released back in the wild!