Earliest Stellar Objects Found 38
Microsofts slave writes "Scientists belive that they have found the earliest objects (new zork times registration required) in space. 26 galaxies and three quasars were observed at thirteen billion light years away, at time when the universe is belived to have been only 1 billion years old."
God /. Just use the google partner thing... (Score:3, Informative)
weird (Score:4, Informative)
If so, that means the average rate of expansion of the universe since that time had to be at least 4/5 C... Unless our physics model is flawed on the large scale, whish it probably is... Who knows, maybe the observed outward acceleration of the universe is due to a force many orders of magnitude weaker than gravity but repelling and inversely proportional to R instead of R^2 so it would be important on the extremely large scale but unnoticeable on the scale of individual galaxies... That would fubar all our redshift measurements and wreak havoc on our largely speculative cosmological model... who knows...
mistake in title (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dumb cosmology question? (Score:4, Informative)
The universe seems to be open, which means it's infinite in extent. However, we can only observe a finite part of it, because light from more distant parts hasn't had time to get to us since the Big Bang. Stuff very far away from us, beyond what's observable to us, is theoretically moving at greater than the speed of light relative to us.
IIRC, in standard cosmological models the stuff at the edge of the observable universe is moving away from us at exactly the speed of light.
You can also think of the expansion as a growth of space itself, not just the motion of galaxies away from each other.