Wednesday, January 27, 2016

They Should Have Named It "Eve"


Astronomers harnessing the combined power of NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have found the faintest object ever seen in the early universe. It existed about 400 million years after the big bang, 13.8 billion years ago. 

The team has nicknamed the object Tayna, which means "first-born" in Aymara, a language spoken in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America.

This article is rather dry and unremarkable, it's written by a PR cog for a collection of scientists after all, but what it means is that we now have to ability to look back in time about 12.6 billion years to see the earliest appearance of...well, creation.  I guess an old parish priest sees this in a different manner than a PR cog.  For me, it's almost as if we can trace the form of God.

Then again, given the nature of light, space, and time, this galaxy may no longer exist and we will not be able to tell for several million years.