See that teeny, tiny barely visible dot in the picture below? That is officially the most distant galaxy ever detected in the Universe, at a mind-boggling 13 billion light years away from Earth.
Sure makes you feel like we are a tiny, insignifigant micro-speck in a vast, wild Universe, doesn’t it? I think Douglas Adams said it best… “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
Check out the BBC article for a detailed explanation of how astronomers discovered UDFy-38135539 (great name for a galaxy) and measured it’s distance from us. It’s a lot of cool sounding science that I can’t even pretend to understand.
I just read that via AP news myself. Mind blowing! That galaxy may have formed not long after we think the Big Bang happened. And here we are, on our tiny spec, approximately 14 billion years later…yikes!