Saturday, November 17, 2012

Putting District 5 in perspective

From the December issue of Harper's Magazine, Our Place in the Universe, by Alan Lightman:

The prize for exploring the greatest distance in space goes to a man named Garth Illingworth, who works in a ten-by-fifteen-foot office at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Illingworth studies galaxies so distant that their light has traveled through space for more than 13 billion years to get here...The most distant galaxy Illingworth has seen so far goes by the name UDFj-39546284 and was documented in early 2011. This galaxy is about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away from Earth, give or take.

I like the "give or take."

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