Astronomers believe that our own Milky Way galaxy is approximately 13.6 billion years old. The newest galaxy we know of formed only about 500 million years ago.
It is observed as it existed 13.4 billion years ago, just 400 million years after the Big Bang; as a result, its distance is sometimes inappropriately reported as 13.4 billion light-years, its light-travel distance measurement.
Over 10 days of observation, the team of astronomers used the Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to scan the deep-field region and soon spotted four galaxies whose red-shift indicated they ranged in age from 320 million to 350 million years after the Big Bang, making them the oldest galaxies ever detected.
One light year is the distance light travels in one year; so if you look at a star ten light years from Earth, the light you see from it left ten years ago and is therefore ten years old.
Oldest black hole ever
What's astonishing is this is the oldest black hole that has ever been discovered in the universe, at the center of a galaxy just 570 million years after the universe began.
Bottom line: The James Webb Space Telescope imaged a galaxy that existed when the universe was just 300 million years old. As of July 21, 2022, GLASS-z13 is the oldest galaxy we've ever seen.
There's a limit to how much of the universe we can see. The observable universe is finite in that it hasn't existed forever. It extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us.
They made observations via the European Space Agency's (ESA) (opens in new tab) Hipparcos satellite and estimated that HD140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known — was a staggering 16 billion years old.
At that time it was 4 billion lightyears away from the proto-Milky Way, but during the almost 13 billion years it took the light to reach us, the Universe has expanded so that it is now a staggering 28 billion lightyears away." The stars we see in the night sky all exist in our own Milky Way galaxy.
Some scientists think there could be as many as one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. Some galaxies are spiral-shaped like ours.
When do galaxies die? Galaxies die when the formation of stars stops in them or when the gas that forms stars is lost. How long do galaxies last? Stars like the sun last only for 10 billion years but the smallest and coolest red dwarfs live for only a few trillion years.
O-type stars form only a tiny fraction of main-sequence stars and the vast majority of these are towards the lower end of the mass range. The most massive and hottest types O3 and O2 are extremely rare, were only defined in 1971 and 2002 respectively, and only a handful are known in total.
This shows us that bright, hot blue stars tend to be younger because they are burning their hydrogen violently fast and tend not to live for very long. Redder, cooler stars are the opposite. They are turning their hydrogen into helium much more slowly and can exist in that state for a very long time.
According to a new study, a star discovered 75 light-years away is no warmer than a freshly brewed cup of coffee. Dubbed CFBDSIR 1458 10b, the star is what's called a brown dwarf.
Scientists can't directly observe black holes with telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. We can, however, infer the presence of black holes and study them by detecting their effect on other matter nearby.
Practically, we cannot even imagine thinking of the end of space. It is a void where the multiverses lie. Our universe alone is expanding in every direction and covering billions of kilometres within seconds. There is infinite space where such universes roam and there is actually no end.
The bottom line: the temperature outer space is brutally cold. The gas particles may be moving really fast, having been energized by the sun, but the outer space is huge and gas particles and stars are lightyears away from one another.
As of May 5, 2015, the galaxy EGS-zs8-1 is the most distant and earliest galaxy measured, forming 670 million years after the Big Bang.
Astronomers have discovered what may be the oldest and most distant galaxy ever observed. The galaxy, called HD1, dates from a bit more than 300 million years after the Big Bang that marked the origin of the universe some 13.8 billion years ago, researchers said on Thursday.
In a very real sense, when you look out at objects in the sky, you are looking back in time. You are looking at an eight-minute-old Sun, a 2000-year-old Southern Nebula, at a 7,600-year-old Carina Nebula.
While such wormholes, if possible, may be limited to transfers of information, humanly traversable wormholes may exist if reality can broadly be described by the Randall–Sundrum model 2, a brane-based theory consistent with string theory.
The most common black holes are probably formed by the collapse of massive stars. Larger black holes are thought to be formed by the sudden collapse or gradual accretion of the mass of millions or billions of stars.
Astronomers have discovered two new black holes that are the closest ones to Earth known, and also represent something that astronomers have never seen before. The black holes, designated Gaia BH1 and Gaia BH2, were discovered in data collected by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia spacecraft.