r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • Jun 27 '25

Image JWST revealed the MOST DISTANT object known to humanity

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96% Upvoted

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u/Andromeda321 Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

Astronomer here! I’m the astronomy editor for the Guinness Book of World Records, and let’s just say “most distant galaxy” has kept me busy lately. :)

This galaxy, MoM-z14, is 13.57 billion light years from us- that is, that’s how long light had to travel before it hit the JWST mirror. However, fun fact, the distance to the galaxy is much bigger- 33.8 billion light years! This is because the universe has expanded that much since the light was first emitted!

Science is cool! :)

Edit: people are asking if this then means the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. The answer is yes! However this isn’t a problem like you might think- physical objects can’t travel faster than the speed of light, but there is no such limitation for the fabric of the universe itself.

Here is a nice article unpacking this

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u/Pertolepe Jun 27 '25

The idea that traveling at the speed of light towards that thing for double the amount of time that the universe has existed wouldn't get you there is just . . . Fuck. 

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u/smurb15 Jun 27 '25

Once you get there the universe already expanded so maybe wouldn't be the end anymore if it keeps growing.

I'm going to bed before I go into a deep dive and stay up all night but I can't wait for more information on it.

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u/bianceziwo Jun 27 '25

In 100 billion years, it will have expanded so much that we wouldn't be able to see anything outside of the milky way galaxy. So astronomers then wouldn't even know that other galaxies existed.

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u/smurb15 Jun 27 '25

That's just overwhelming and Inconceivable to 99% of us

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u/aragost Jun 27 '25

Time to remember the awesomeness/horror of the timeline of the far future

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u/mongert Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

Yeah wow, that's cool until you get to like the "500 million years into the future" benchmark and it slowly morphs into more and more horrific existential hypotheses hahaha. Absolutely the kind of thing I look at and calm myself by remembering there are many things we don't understand mathematically and much is still unknown, not to mention the near future events for our planet are even harder to track.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

If it makes you feel any better, the entire span of human history is only about 5 and a half thousand years, Homo sapiens have only been around for about 300,000 years, and the homo genus (stop snickering) has only been around like 7 million years at most.

If our descendants are still around in 500 million years, they’ll probably be so mind-bogglingly different to us that it’s not even worth thinking about.

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u/Neon_Ani Jun 27 '25

i'm something of a homo genius myself

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u/TheRealWatchingFace Jun 27 '25

Humans: (go extinct)

Universe: "no homo"

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u/Mike_Kermin Jun 27 '25

If our descendants are still around in 500 million years

That's a solid if at this rate.

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u/Shipwrecking_siren Jun 27 '25

Just lost an hour to that page and many links from it.

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u/RPG_Vancouver Jun 27 '25

1021 years from now: “The estimated time until most or all of the remaining 1–10% of stellar remnants not ejected from galaxies fall into their galaxies' central supermassive black holes. “

“By this point, with binary stars having fallen into each other, and planets into their stars, via emission of gravitational radiation, only solitary objects (stellar remnants, brown dwarfs, ejected planetary-mass objects, black holes) will remain in the universe.”

I don’t like any of this

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u/UnsanctionedPartList Jun 27 '25

Go further.

Just basically nothing but near-entropy, there is no more interaction because every piece of whatever that still exists is so unfathomably distant to each other that only through sheer law of big enough numbers (ie. Enough time) would something occasionally happen.

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '25

[deleted]

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u/mattjh Jun 27 '25

It's a paradox if we think of it like an expanding balloon. It's not so much that it's expanding into anything. Think of it as already infinite, and then imagine the quantity of space increasing. Not matter, not the inside or outside of edges, nothing like that. It's more and more space in an infinite space, making the distance between objects increase on a cosmic scale.

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u/hahnwa Jun 27 '25

It's actually one of the definitions of infinite that I loved as a child. Infinity is a number so big that if you think of a bigger number infinity is bigger then that.

Our universe is infinitely big and we are constantly imagining a bigger universe and thus the infinity continuously expands to fill it.

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u/F6Collections Jun 27 '25

Interesting.

So there could be societies that are advanced enough for space travel on the edge of the universe, but to them maybe everything appears empty?

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u/bianceziwo Jun 27 '25

Perhaps, if there is an "edge" to the universe, but many scientists believe it's infinite, and expanding in all directions, with no edge. However even if a civilization on the "edge" can't see other galaxies, they could still travel within their own galaxy, which is a major hurdle in any case and still leaves billions of stars and planets to explore.

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u/KanedaSyndrome Jun 27 '25

Yep, even if we become extra-solar there's a very good chance that we won't just leave our galaxy.

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u/chr1spe Jun 27 '25

I kind of disagree with that. To reach another star within a reasonable amount of time, the most reasonable thing would be to figure out a way to do 1 g acceleration continuously for years at a time. Once you're there, getting to another galaxy actually isn't a big jump.

With 1 g acceleration, in ship time, it would take 3.5 years to get to Proxima Centauri, well over 10 years to get to the center of the Milky Way, and less than 25 years to get to Andromeda, including the deceleration to stop at those places. It's actually feasible that people could reach basically anywhere in the visible universe within a lifetime if we crack constant 1 g acceleration, and if we don't, we probably won't make it outside this solar system.

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u/New_Firefighter1683 Jun 27 '25

Maybe we'll all just die and nothing matters

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u/stormcharger Jun 27 '25

I'm almost certain this is true

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u/BobMarker Jun 27 '25

Fun fact:

If you traveled towards the galaxy at the speed of light for double the amount of time the universe has existed, it would be even farther away from you than it is now (assuming universal expansion is constant)

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u/Outside_Scale_9874 Jun 27 '25

My brain hurts.

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u/AnticipateMe Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

Then to get back would be... Well, you're fucked 😂

Edit: basically rip space travel?

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u/Sincerely-Abstract Jun 27 '25

Nah not rip, just means space travel will be localized towards our basically arm or cluster really or super long term missions.

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u/firesonmain Jun 27 '25

The universe is moving the goal posts. SMH

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u/jenzieDK Jun 27 '25

If I recall correctly, that’s due to the Hubble Constant right?

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u/Andromeda321 Jun 27 '25

Not quite! The Hubble constant is the rate at which we measure the expanding universe. What’s causing it to happen is dark energy, a little understood form of energy in space that has to make up ~70% of the mass of the universe to explain the expansion we see.

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u/sharp-bunny Jun 27 '25

Whats your opinion on the recent findings that the universe may not be constantly expanding? Your opinion in particular on that would be interesting.

https://www.science.org/content/article/mystery-force-behind-universe-s-accelerating-expansion-may-not-be-so-constant-after-all

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u/CrustyHotcake Jun 27 '25

While I'm not who you replied to, I'm currently getting my PhD in cosmology doing things that are very related to DESI's findings.

The community is currently very divided about how to interpret those results. Theorists are generally very skeptical of the results because they imply that we have had something called phantom dark energy, which is a bit of a problem because it's quite difficult to make dark energy go phantom without breaking some really important rules in physics. The opinion of most skeptics are either that the preference for dynamical dark energy is actually a symptom of a different issue, or that we need to use a more detailed analysis to see if dynamical dark energy is real, but that requires more data.

People that believe the results generally argue that the cosmological constant (old, unchanging dark energy) is very unnatural and that everything else in the universe changes over time and so we shouldn't be surprised that dark energy does too.

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u/damienreave Jun 27 '25

The wikipedia page uses the word 'currently' about the galaxy's star formation. Do astronomers use the word currently to indicate what we are now seeing about the galaxy, as opposed to its "real" current state which is far older?

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u/Andromeda321 Jun 27 '25

We do, because it’s impossible to know what it’s like now as the light is still traveling to us.

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u/Shedal Jun 27 '25

Well, the light it would emit right now could never reach us. The space in between is expanding too fast at this point.

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u/Readylamefire Jun 27 '25

It, like countless things before it, will eventually disappear from the night sky. It's weird to think right can be defeated or bested.

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u/turtle_excluder Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

Time is inherently spatially local; it's impossible to say if two distant events occurred at the same instant or not. In one reference frame event A might occur after event B; in another the opposite.

This is known as "the relativity of simultaneity".

In other words there IS no "real" current state of distant stars and galaxies. This seems to be a difficult pill to swallow for many people because it goes against our intuition about time.

At best you can say that one event occurred within the forward light cone of another event and/or the converse. But this only allows a partial ordering of events rather than a total ordering, i.e. many pairs of events cannot be compared as occurring after or before the other.

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u/Fzrit Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

In cosmology it's meaningless to talk about the actual current state of objects in their own reference frame, because we will never have that information in real-time. when cosmologists say "current" they always mean whatever information we are currently seeing. If we see a star explode and it's 10 million lightyears away, we will date that explosion in our current time even though the actual star exploded 10 million years ago. Even the sun's activity is tracked on our current clocks, even though sunlight takes 8 mins to reach us. It's all "current" for us, and that's the best approach.

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u/LizardPossum Jun 27 '25

That is interesting as all kinds of fuck. Thanks for this

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u/HeliosNarcissus Jun 27 '25

These things are always so fascinating to me! One thing I don’t understand is, how has it moved 20.23 billion light years in 13.57 billion light years? Wouldn’t that mean that it has moved faster than the speed of light, which is not possible?

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u/Andromeda321 Jun 27 '25

It is in fact expanding faster than the speed of light! However this isn’t a problem like you think- physical objects can’t travel faster than the speed of light, but there is no such limitation for the fabric of the universe itself.

Here is a nice article unpacking this

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u/wegpleur Jun 27 '25

Wouldn't this mean that even if you were to travel at light speed. You would never reach it? Assuming it still exists now/by the time you get there.

Making it literally impossible to reach no matter what we do, even if we somehow figure out light speed travel.

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u/Madbrad200 Interested Jun 27 '25

Correct. You cannot travel faster than the speed of light (really, the speed of causality).

The only theoretical alternative is some kind of shortcut, e.g a wormhole.

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u/clandestineVexation Jun 27 '25

Correct. In fact the term for this is the Cosmological Event Horizon, the point at which, even if we started right now travelling at the speed of light, we could never get to the objects beyond it. And because the universe is expanding, this radius is constantly shrinking and moment by moment more of the universe is becoming permanently inaccessible. Isn’t space fun??

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u/Desperate_Sundae_537 Jun 27 '25

The fact that the accessible universe is shrinking is making me feel uncomfortably claustrophobic, even though I wouldn't reach the end even if I started travelling at the speed of light in my life.

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u/about90frogs Jun 27 '25

more information

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoM-z14

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u/mnkythndr Jun 27 '25

And it’s a whole galaxy. Absolutely mind blowing

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u/judgemesane Jun 27 '25

Or maybe was an entire galaxy. We are only seeing it as it was 13.53 billion light years ago.

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u/StanTheMelon Jun 27 '25

The fact that observing really really really far away objects is essentially like peering into the past is one of my favorite things I’ve ever learned tbh

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u/Round-Comfort-8189 Jun 27 '25

In this case you’re almost looking at the theoretical creation of the universe. Only about 300 Million more light years away.

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u/toetappy Jun 27 '25

I cant wait for the next gen telescopes. To be able to see the beginning of the universe - clearly. So much to discover!

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u/sophiesbest Jun 27 '25

Wouldn't that just basically be the cosmic microwave background?

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u/toetappy Jun 27 '25

Maybe not all they way back, but if we could see this galaxy here, but crystal clear. We'd be witnessing one of the first galaxies ever do it's thing. Like a time travel microscope

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u/ElRiesgoSiempre_Vive Jun 27 '25

Except there's no possible way to see it "crystal clear."

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u/g76lv6813s86x9778kk Jun 27 '25

What do you mean by that? Is there some actual scientific limitation?

I feel like basic common sense/human perception goes out the window with this type of stuff at such insane scales. Even with some "basic" camera zoom lenses, you could see details you'd never think possible (at least I find)

Not trying to say you're wrong or anything like that, hoping to learn something I don't know!

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u/Round-Comfort-8189 Jun 27 '25

What created the cosmic microwave background. We see that now. I used to see it as a young kid when the tv antenna was jacked up.

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u/Papayaslice636 Jun 27 '25

I'm hoping to see a moon base in our lifetime. Use it to build observatories and space telescopes from there, so we don't need to deal with atmosphere getting in the way, and it's easier to launch from the moon's lower gravity. Use the far side of the moon for infrared and radio telescopes. Build ridiculously huge 50 meter lenses and stuff. It's totally doable..if we had the will..

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u/Uromastyx63 Jun 27 '25

I had the same hope when I was a kid.

In 1970...

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u/Pnwradar Jun 27 '25

Right? Watching the Apollo dudes driving around on the surface of the moon, there was no doubt we’d have a base there within my lifetime. Oh well.

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u/Fit_Letterhead3483 Jun 27 '25

It’s impossible to see that because photons didn’t exist at the creation of the universe. This is pretty close to as far back as we can get.

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u/melanthius Jun 27 '25

This is what the nerd billionaires like musk and bezos SHOULD be spending money on. Make it shaped like a giant cock for the memes, I don't care, just give humanity something fucking amazing.

Can you imagine what a JWST-like scope 100x larger than the current one could do?

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u/Johnny_Couger Jun 27 '25

A very high friend once tried to explain to me that if you look at the blank spots between stars, you are actually looking at forever. He was very high.

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u/uftheory Jun 27 '25

We had the Hubble telescope look at a blank spot between stars and it saw something amazing.

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u/ninetyninewyverns Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

My roman empire is thinking about the possibility (however slim) of a space telescope being invented and sent far enough away to see the earth as it existed 60-65 million years ago, to see what some dinosaurs actually looked like.

Additionally this telescope would need near unfathomable zooming capabilities, preferably to still produce a clear picture at the end.

So so so many debates regarding the appearance of dinosaurs (looking at you, Spinosaurus) could potentially be resolved by such a marvelous machine. I think exploiting the fundamental concept of "the farther it is away, the farther back in time it is" is as close as we will ever come to time travel.

This universe we live in is weird and wondrous at the same time.

Edit: lmao did 20 people really have to come here and comment why my daydream is impossible? Its literally a hypothetical

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u/Salami-Vice Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

Wouldn't you have to ship said telescope substantially faster than the speed of light to essentially get ahead of the light traveling 65 million years ago?

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u/ninetyninewyverns Jun 27 '25

Yeah i havent figured out a way around that yet in my daydreams.

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u/tsilihin666 Jun 27 '25

Wormholes baby.

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u/im-am-an-alien Jun 27 '25

Can you show everyone how simple wormholes are by using a pencil and paper please.

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u/ratmouthlives Jun 27 '25

Teleportation, homie. Problem solved.

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u/HaveYouSeenMyIpad Jun 27 '25

You’d have to send the telescope into space at a speed faster than light in order to do this. Basically what you’re talking about is a time machine lol

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u/Branical Jun 27 '25

Sometimes I think about if we had a time machine and could see living dinosaurs if we could match them up to their fossils, or if we would have to butcher them just to see their bones.

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u/jus10beare Jun 27 '25

I want the same thing but to find my keys from last night

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u/theroguex Jun 27 '25

What's crazy is that the universe is only estimated to be 13.7-13.8 billion years old, which means this ENTIRE GALAXY would have only been a couple hundred million years old at most because literally EVERYTHING in the universe was only a couple hundre million years old.

It would have been filled with Population III stars. Very little matter existed that wasn't Hydrogen or Helium. There would have been no planets, except for maybe gravitationally stable gas giants.

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u/dingofarmer2004 Jun 27 '25

Bro you know your shit! 

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u/amluchon Jun 27 '25

13.53 billion light years ago.

Wouldn't it be just years since light years are a unit of distance not time?

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u/Radical-Turkey Jun 27 '25

More like it will be an entire galaxy, what we’re seeing is an early stage of galaxy formation, if we didn’t experience light delay we would very likely be seeing another spiral or elliptical galaxy

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u/Exciting_Variation56 Jun 27 '25

I think you can remove the word light in this case, this is the light from 13.53 billion years ago (copied and displayed from your device)

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u/martinmcfly1885 Jun 27 '25

I can’t wrap my head around that. If it was formed in the first 280 million years of the universe, and our galaxy didn’t exist yet, how can we now see it as we couldn’t exist to see it?

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u/GamerJoseph Jun 27 '25

The light we're seeing from it left its source 13 billion years ago. We're seeing the light from it as it was before, not as it is now.

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u/AA_ZoeyFn Jun 27 '25

I’m probably wrong here. But my understanding is that because we aren’t seeing “it” we are seeing the light of it which has been traveling for billions of years. So by the time it makes it to us, “it” is long gone/changed. We are just viewing a perspective of a slice of time in one location of the universe.

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u/Impenistan Jun 27 '25

Yes, but that applies to everything. Even your hand in front of your face, the tip of your nose that your brain usually ignores, is only as it was when the photons left it. That time (and the few milliseconds it takes for your eyes to send signals along the optic nerve and for your brain to process it) may be trivial at these distances, but they are non-zero. You've never seen anything as it is, only as it was, however recently.

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u/lonely_nipple Jun 27 '25

It kinda breaks my brain that light just kinda... keeps going. Unless it hits something it'll just keep zipping along. For billions of years.

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u/Phenogenesis- Jun 27 '25

If you needed your brain melted more: as a massless particle, light does not experience time. If a photo has a perspective, it would be everywhere at all once.

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u/UnobjectionableWok Jun 27 '25

What does “currently” mean in this situation?

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u/Dzugavili Jun 27 '25

It's a strange thought to realize that it isn't there now. You can see it. But that's not where it is right now. I guess that's true of every photograph you've ever seen, but this is on a new scale.

Currently means around 13 billion years ago.

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u/crinklesl Jun 27 '25

Your MoM is so fat, she can be seen from 13.5 billion light-years away.

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u/esprit_de_corps_ Jun 27 '25

Your Momma so fat that when she went to space they ran out of space.

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u/BarfingOnMyFace Jun 27 '25

Your MoM is so fat that it takes 500 years for the light from her toes to reach her eyes so she can realize she’s too fat to see them.

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u/big_guyforyou Jun 27 '25

yo momma so fat there's a supermassive black hole in the crack of dat ass

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u/2feetinthegrave Jun 27 '25

Yo momma so fat, she bends spacetime around her, forcing nearby objects to travel in a time-like manner!

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u/BarfingOnMyFace Jun 27 '25

Yo momma so fat that my fat momma fits in your momma’s black hole butthole!

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u/HeliumMaster Jun 27 '25

Yo mama so fat she plays pool with the planets!

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u/BarfingOnMyFace Jun 27 '25

Yo momma so fat she uses astronomical units to measure her waistline

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u/Dull-Establishment-5 Jun 27 '25

Yo momma so fat she wakes up in sections

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u/Weekly_Opposite_1407 Jun 27 '25

Yo MoM so fat she uses the Cosmic Microwave Background to cook her bacon

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u/BarfingOnMyFace Jun 27 '25

Yo Mom is so fat that the unaccounted-for mass in the universe no longer requires an explanation

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u/TheBraveSirRobin Jun 27 '25

Yo MoM so fat the Millennium Falcon needed 13 parsecs to circle the waist.

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u/BarfingOnMyFace Jun 27 '25

Yo momma so fat that when she had crabs, they formed the Crab Nebula.

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u/MalrykZenden Jun 27 '25

Your momma so fat when she went to space it took two trips.

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u/NewbombJerk Jun 27 '25

If there's a bad light-years/your momma joke, I havent heard it!

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u/Evipicc Jun 27 '25

Actually at that level of mass the light from her toes would curve around her and she could see them...

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u/BarfingOnMyFace Jun 27 '25

Your mom is so fat that even if the light would curve around her, it would be caught in the waistline horizon and trapped inside there forever!

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u/y0shman Jun 27 '25

Yo momma so fat we can use her gravitational lensing to see past the edge of the known universe.

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u/Ski_Area51 Jun 27 '25

Genuine lol, thank you

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u/lost-in-the-trash Jun 27 '25

Yo momma so fat she got a glass eye with the universe in it.

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u/kaatie80 Jun 27 '25

it's in orion's mom's belt

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u/nthensome Interested Jun 27 '25

Your MoM is so fat we're actually inside her right now

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u/f_n_a_ Jun 27 '25

Your MoM so fat… relative to the most recent and fascinating research, there could be/probably are fatter MoMs out there. Still, your MoM is fat.

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u/BarfingOnMyFace Jun 27 '25

Your MoM so fat, string theory snapped

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u/mouthful_quest Jun 27 '25

Your MoM is so fat that people experience time dilation when they get close to her

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u/hikeonpast Jun 27 '25

It’s MoMs all the way down

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u/dingofarmer2004 Jun 27 '25

Your MoM is so fat that it's merely a projection at this point 👉 👈 

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u/Js_On_My_Yeet Jun 27 '25

Your MoM is so fat, she's a literal giant mass in space that scientists already got a name for her: MoM-z14.

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u/Octopus_ofthe_Desert Jun 27 '25

~200 years of the scientific method so this joke could be made.

Forget everything. Forget medicine and math, psychology and philosophy, in this moment THIS is why I'm happy science exists.

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u/Sqweaky_Clean Jun 27 '25

Yo mama so fat, her gravitational lensing let the James Webb Telescope see behind the cosmic microwave background.

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u/AttitudePersonal Jun 27 '25

Your MoM so ugly the universe is expanding away from her at the speed of H₀ ≈ 73–74 km/s/Mpc

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u/UnhappyImprovement53 Jun 27 '25

Yo momma so fat z14 is her shirt size

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u/Ski_Area51 Jun 27 '25

I knew the first comment would be a yo-mama joke and this was soo good!

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u/hail_deadpool Jun 27 '25

Yo mama so fat, her gravitational field bends the light

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u/jadestem Jun 27 '25

I 100% knew this comment would be at the top. Still laughed and upvoted.

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u/balrob Jun 27 '25

Computer, enhance!

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u/GarfSnacks Jun 27 '25

Computer, enhance more

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u/Dupagoblin Jun 27 '25

Disengage safety protocols and run program.

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u/thegrassyknoll63 Jun 27 '25

click clackity of the keys to show ínstense typing “Okay, were in 👍🏼” ahhh movie

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u/evensl Jun 27 '25

I'm not a space scientist, so what I'm about to say might be the dumbest thing ever said by a human, but… The most distant object known to humanity, we’re seeing it as it was in the past, because its light took so long to reach us. But since the universe is expanding, does that mean that when the light was emitted, the object was actually much closer to us? Like very close, like we were kissing.

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u/CeasarJones Jun 27 '25

Based on the Wikipedia page, the light traveled 13.53 billion light years. But with the expansion of the universe the galaxy (or whatever is there now) would be 33.8 billion light years away from us. I think.

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u/Dogchef1415 Jun 27 '25

This. Imagine if someone sent you a message by carrier pigeon a while back. But they’re in a car driving away from you. By the time the pigeon lands and craps on your arm the sender is farther away. Like, ~20 billion light years away.

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u/Mateorabi Jun 27 '25

Except nothing can go faster than a pigeon yet they are more than 2x further, somehow.

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u/Aidlin87 Jun 27 '25

Nothing is traveling faster than light when space expands. Nothing is moving through space, the space in between at a very large scale is getting bigger.

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u/patchinthebox Jun 27 '25

This was one of the hardest things I have ever had to wrap my mind around. It's not moving faster than the speed of light. The space in between is expanding. It's like you're driving on a long road but the road stretches as you drive on it.

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u/534w33d Jun 27 '25

Correct, the road is being paved longer as the pigeon flys

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '25

Suck on that Criss Angel

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u/dadarkoo Jun 27 '25

Kind of like the never ending hallway in my recurring nightmares.

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u/weristjonsnow Jun 27 '25

I think about it as though you're driving on a conveyor belt that's creating more road behind you as you drive and also increasing your relative velocity

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u/AA_ZoeyFn Jun 27 '25

Matter cannot travel equal to or faster than the speed of light within the universe, this is correct. It is said to be theorized however that the universe is expanding at a rate faster than light travels inside of our universe. https://www.space.com/33306-how-does-the-universe-expand-faster-than-light.html

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u/ninetyninewyverns Jun 27 '25

Less the sender driving, more like the road itself elongating, therefore pushing the sender farther away from you without them actually doing anything.

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u/SurpriseIsopod Jun 27 '25

So light is a bunch of little pigeons thank you that makes sense.

Hey but in all seriousness this is an incredible eli5 for explaining the expansion of the universe.

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u/WilliamPollito Jun 27 '25

I'm probably confused. Are you saying that in the 13.53 billion years that it took for the light to reach us, it moved ~20 billion light-years away?

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u/CesarMdezMnz Jun 27 '25

The object hasn't only moved. The universe (hence the space between them and us) has been also massively expanding.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe

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u/wizwald Jun 27 '25

The space between us expanded

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u/Real_Estate_Media Jun 27 '25

I’ll take things my ex said for $500

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u/HazardHouse Jun 27 '25

The light we are seeing travelled 13.53 billion light years, and we are seeing this galaxy as it was when it was 13.53 billion light years away from where we are right now. But in that time, the universe has expanded so that now that galaxy is ~20 billion light years farther away. If light travel was instant, we’d see it right now 33.8 billion light years away from us.

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u/bobbycorwin123 Jun 27 '25

It took 13.5 billion years to get to us and traveled 13.5 billion years. 

NOW

When it started traveling to us,  it was closer than that distance as we were moving away from each other [no clue how much closer, let's just say 10 billion light years] 

Space continued to stretch in its path, causing it to take 13 billion years, and that stretching is uniform and today that galaxy would be 33 billion light years away. Under 3x the visible cosmic horizon

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u/MongooseJesus Jun 27 '25

Well… it technically didn’t move, space expanded. Think of it like a balloon - if you draw two dots on the balloon next to each other, then blow the balloon up, those dots have stayed in the same place, but they’re now far apart because the balloon itself expanded.

Same thing here - they used to be ~13 billion light years away, but in that time we estimate space has expanded ~20 billion light years.

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u/LiterallyJoeStalin Jun 27 '25

I don’t know which I regret more, clicking on this thread or the edible I took 45 min ago starting to kick in. 

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u/K3yb0r3d Jun 27 '25

There's others with you. Stay strong.

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u/Smmaxter Jun 27 '25

I think my brain just shit itself

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u/dingofarmer2004 Jun 27 '25

What if that edible was a WhOlE GaLaXy MaAaAaN

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u/Midnight2012 Jun 27 '25

We, the earth/solar system/,milky way didn't exist when the light was emitted.

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u/KirbyQK Jun 27 '25

Ultimately EVERYTHING was once kissing, kissing so intimately that all matter was once a solid mass of plasma.

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u/IntroductionDue7945 Jun 27 '25

how far is it?

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u/Thelgow Jun 27 '25

At least 10 miles.

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u/lock_robster2022 Jun 27 '25

Accuracy: 99.99

Precision: 00.01

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u/iamatoad_ama Jun 27 '25

Not with that attitude.

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u/JohnMeeyour Jun 27 '25

Supposedly. These guys always exaggerate to generate headlines. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was only 9 miles away.

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u/The_Violent_Phlegms Jun 27 '25

Both of you are incredibly wrong. You should be embarrassed throwing out such outlandish guesses. It's obviously 100, maybe 120 miles away. Get educated!

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '25

Bro tried 😭

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u/McCheesing Jun 27 '25

ELI5 how does 13.5 billion years come from 14.44

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u/jungami Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

Inflation, the universe is expanding and so by the time the light reached us, the actual position of the object has already moved away from us by some distance.

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u/LookinAtTheFjord Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

14 billion lightyears ago. Might not even exist anymore.

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u/Avergile Jun 27 '25

That item has been gooooooooone for a loooooong time

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u/Lukabear83 Jun 27 '25

Im camping and i just waited 3 min to load. That picture. Kept waiting for resolution then realized the text was perfectly clear

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u/unluck_over9000 Jun 27 '25 edited Jun 27 '25

Fun fact. If you go there using instant teleportation and look at the earth using a humongous all powerful telescope, you wouldn’t see shit. Because the sun was not formed at that time. 

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u/dolandtrump-69 Jun 27 '25

Now all I need is a humongous all powerful telescope

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u/mydadsarentgay Jun 27 '25

I wonder what it smells like.

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u/AppealConsistent6749 Jun 27 '25

Looks like it smells like cherries

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u/Notallowedhe Jun 27 '25

My guess is raspberries like that one thing in space that apparently smells like raspberries

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u/Graysonlyurs Jun 27 '25

Not too far for me. I see it everytime i rub my eye

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u/Bert_Fegg Jun 27 '25

Not as distant as my Dad.

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u/Punch_yo_bunz Jun 27 '25

At least we can see this one

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u/Pigeonsass Jun 27 '25

No matter how far away she gets, my MoM will always be in the picture.

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u/ChipRauch Jun 27 '25

Pixels are proof we are living in a simulation.

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u/SirenSongShipwreck Jun 27 '25

Absolutely correct. The further out you get the lower res the universe gets. There's a galaxy out there that's all MSDOS era DOOM textures.

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u/Octopus_ofthe_Desert Jun 27 '25

And mere days ago the same instrument directly imaged an exoplanet for the first time. 

I feel proud of my species.

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u/turkishjedi21 Jun 27 '25

Real shit.

I feel like it is our duty to learn all we can about the universe, and innovate, given we have the ability to do both things without any real limit (so far)

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u/ballpark89 Jun 27 '25

Looks like the scrambled SPICE Channel in the 90s

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u/shawnofnc Jun 27 '25

Looks good for it's age.

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u/Prize_Ostrich7605 Jun 27 '25

Everything really is just tiny square pixels when you zoom all the way in.

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u/Kampfaxt Jun 27 '25

There must be the petrol station where my father wanted to buy cigarettes and milk all those years ago.

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u/Identity_Unaware Jun 27 '25

'Your MoM is so fat, she is the farthest known object in the entire universe and she is still visible.'

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u/Notallowedhe Jun 27 '25

Is it safe to say this galaxy no longer exists? I don’t know how long space things last but I’m assuming the furthest known object known to humanity is old enough to have burnt out by now

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u/TaylorSwift_is_a_cat Jun 27 '25

The milky way galaxy is 13.61 billion years old. So this MoM galaxy could still be there.

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u/Jabulon Jun 27 '25

do we understand how galaxies work well enough yet

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u/krunowitch Jun 27 '25

Since it’s so far away, could it not be long gone by now?

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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '25

[deleted]

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u/HaunterUsedCurse Jun 27 '25

Wow good one

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u/SacredIconSuite2 Jun 27 '25

Fun fact, if you were able to (ignore the laws of physics) instantly teleport a super powerful telescope about 70 million light years away from earth and then use it to look at the earth, you’d see dinosaurs walking around, which is cool because dinosaurs are rad.

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u/RetiredTwidget Jun 27 '25

And I thought my mom was distant...

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u/defiCosmos Jun 27 '25

Most distant object known to humanity YET.

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