The almost everlasting heavens above us.
There is so much information around us these days that it’s easy to forget how incredibly advantaged are those today that wish to learn about everything and anything. It was just such a meander around the internet that brought me to a website called Science Daily, a wonderful daily digest of top science news items.
And a browse through that web site brought me to this piece on the creation of the very first stars in the universe.
June 1, 2007 — Astronomers removed light from closer and better known galaxies and stars from pictures taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope. The remaining images are believed to be the first objects in space, 13 billion light years away.
The first stars in our universe are long gone, but their light still shines, giving us a peek at what the universe looked like in its early years.
Astrophysicists believe they’ve spotted a faint glow from stars born at the beginning of time. Harvey Moseley, Ph.D., an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says, “The reason they’re faint is just because they’re very, very far away, they’re over at the far edge of the universe.”
I don’t know about you but I find this so deeply inspiring – a reminder of the instinctive nature of man to enquire and explore. And it is this exploratory instinct that will pull us all through from the challenges that we all face today.
Anyway, I’m wandering off the subject!
Do read the piece in full here and then watch the following video from Avi Loeb.
Oh, want to know how far 13 billion light years is? Brace yourself!
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second or more properly expressed 299,792.458 km/sec. See here. (Brilliant website by the way) That is 10 trillion kilometres a year.
So 13 billion light years is simply! 10 trillion multiplied by 13 billion kilometres. Anyone got a larger calculator?
By Paul Handover
Learning from Dogs 
I don’t know but when compared to 14 trillion of US public Debt, suddenly “10 trillions of kilometres a year”, does either not sound that much, or just confirms the debt to be astronomical.
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Per, Astronomically stupid!
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I take the liberty to suppose you are refering to the debt!!!
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Hi,
Yes it’s great that we can learn more and more, it’s just a matter of searching whatever subject your interested in. I sure with future generations, they will be a lot more knowledgeable than we ever were.
I think we can learn so much from the universe, and as our technology gets better I’m sure we will learn a lot more about the universes beyond our own.
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The one thing that would change everything is to discover intelligent life on another world. One day, perhaps! Although the odds of humans being able to reach out to other life at the same time as that other life being in a technological state to hear us and reply is astronomically minute.
What you seem to be saying is that we mustn’t lose faith in there being a new and better order ahead.
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magsx2
I am not sure. New generations are getting used to getting so much information digested for them so that they might forget how to digest information, or worse they might fall into the trap of being solely consumers of information digested by populist digesters.
As from now, with the GPS forget about our kids knowing what north, south, east and west is… though on the other hand, when it comes to understanding cosmic matters, that might just be a benefit, since a north, south, east and west are sort of binding.
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Hi,
Yes that is a very good point, I didn’t think of it that way at all. It made me remember an incident I had with a younger person concerning a Street Directory, didn’t have a clue as to how to look up and find a street, and asked why I didn’t have a GPS.
So yes you may be right there.
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Real men don’t use GPS!
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Cosmic Modesty Needed:
Life needs time, lots of time, for intelligence. What strikes me in the new solar systems discovered is how unstable they are.
Look at Mars: life, probably even OUR life started there. But then, having no enough a magnetic field, the planet lost most of its atmosphere.
Another warning: the various notions about the universe (“edge of the universe”, blah blah blah) are much less scientifically robust than some scientists claim. In particular, even using standard science, the size of the universe could well be at least a 1,000 bigger than the 14 billion light year piece observed. One thing is sure: it’s incredibly immense out there, and not just in physical, but conceptual size. We know lower bounds in size and complexity, but have no idea whatsoever about the upper bounds.
The reason for the modesty is that it is not a good thing when highly uncertain science is presented as certain, just as much as really certain parts of science. Because when, ultimately the ineluctable collapse of immodest certainty occurs, all of science gets slashed with doubt, and the American witches run for the US Senate on a completely crazed platform. Scientists ought not to give respectability to craziness by leveraging it themselves.
Make no mistake: speculation is central to science and even more to philosophy. Just it ought to be labeled as such. All of modern cosmology rests on something called the Inflaton Field, and it’s just as much a rabbit out of a hat as in the best circus acts. There is no justification for it, except to explain what we see: something very big. That’s called an ad hoc hypothesis, and it has little predictive power (differently from the neutrino, or the W, or the Higgs, how do you check for it?)
In any case, the national debt is secure: it has a long way to go.
PA
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Reminds me of the little ditty that the only thing that is certain, is that nothing is certain!
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