12-22-2020, 07:10 PM
A new study looking at galaxy GN-z11 has determined it may be the farthest / oldest galaxy ever observed.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...-universe/
What I find particularly nice about this is the confirmation that ground based observatories are useful and will be useful to compliment off-earth telescopes.
Quote:...Astronomers led by Nobunari Kashikawa, a professor in the department of astronomy at the University of Tokyo, embarked on a mission to find the universe’s most distant observable galaxy, to learn more about how it formed and when.
“From previous studies, the galaxy GN-z11 seems to be the farthest detectable galaxy from us, at 13.4 billion light-years, or 134 nonillion kilometers (that’s 134 followed by 30 zeros),” Kashikawa said in a statement. “But measuring and verifying such a distance is not an easy task.”
...
“We looked at ultraviolet light specifically, as that is the area of the electromagnetic spectrum we expected to find the redshifted chemical signatures,” Kashikawa said. “The Hubble Space Telescope detected the signature multiple times in the spectrum of GN-z11.”
“However,” he added, “even the Hubble cannot resolve ultraviolet emission lines to the degree we needed. So we turned to a more up-to-date ground-based spectrograph, an instrument to measure emission lines, called MOSFIRE, which is mounted to the Keck I telescope in Hawaii.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...-universe/
What I find particularly nice about this is the confirmation that ground based observatories are useful and will be useful to compliment off-earth telescopes.