Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog

Monday, October 25th.  The sun will rise at 8:10.  It’ll be up for 10 hours and 30 minutes, setting at 6:41.   The moon, 3 days past full, will rise at 8:00 this evening.  |  The European Southern Observatory has announced the discovery of a new most distance galaxy.  I prefer to think of as the earliest galaxy found after the Big Bang itself.  Astronomers are very sure the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago plus or minus 200 million years.  We can only see back to about 13.4 billion years ago when the universe became transparent.  The distance of a particular faint galaxy, discovered on a Hubble Ultra Deep Field image was investigated using ESO’s Very large Telescope and it was learned that using its velocity of recession that it was found to come from an infant galaxy that existed 600 million years after the Big Bang.  Very early indeed.  The Universe’s dark ages lasted only perhaps 200 million years.