“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” –Oscar Wilde
Beyond the planet Earth, beyond all the stars in the night sky, and beyond the Milky Way galaxy, there’s literally an entire Universe out there.
The farther away we’re able to look, the more galaxies we’re able to see. As far as our instruments have ever taken us, we’ve always found more and more galaxies filling up the darkest depths we’ve ever been able to peer into. Even the darkest, most devoid-of-light areas we can find, if we look for long enough, will eventually reveal these island Universes to our telescopes.
I can even show you the single most distant galaxy we’ve ever found: its name is UDFj-39546284. Its light has been traveling towards us for 13.4 billion years, it’s currently around 33 billion light-years away, and all the matter in the Universe was a mere 370 million years old — or just 2.6% of its current age — when light was emitted from it.
But that’s just the current record holder. Our list of distance records is constantly changing, because the reality is this: we haven’t yet detected the first stars or galaxies in the Universe. Our instruments — so far, at least — simply haven’t been built for it.
This may seem counterintuitive to you, after all. Should you just be able to point your telescope at a location in the sky, and if you point it for long enough, gathering enough light, shouldn’t you eventually see something if there’s something there?
That is, after all, something we’ve done with the Hubble space telescope, and one of the ways we’ve discovered some of the current cosmic record holders. But there’s an intrinsic limit to what something like the Hubble space telescope is going to see. And unfortunately, it has nothing to do with where the most distant galaxy is.
Telescopes, like any instrument, are limited by the laws of physics. In the particular case of a telescope, it’s limited by the size of the primary mirror — or the telescope’s light-gathering-power — and the wavelengths of light that its instruments can detect. You have to pick a wavelength; if you just “get everything”, you’ll simply be swamped by the strongest signal out there. And as you may have guessed, objects have very, very different appearances and properties when you look at them in different wavelengths.
What does this have to do with distant galaxies? It turns out that galaxies in the very early Universe aren’t expected to be all that different from galaxies today. They’ll still be powered by stars, the vast majority of stars will still be fusing hydrogen into helium in their core, and they’ll still give off light the way the vast majority of stars do today. This should be true whether the Universe is 10%, 1%, or even just 0.01% of its current age!
Except for minute details, stars and galaxies work pretty much the same way at all times and at all distances.
But even though the sources of light aren’t all that different from the ones nearby, they have a hell of a journey to make in order to reach us. For one, the Universe is expanding, meaning that the farther away a galaxy is, the more the light will be stretched, or redshifted, due to the expansion of the Universe. The longer the light has to travel in order to reach our eyes, the more time the expansion of the Universe has to affect the wavelength of all the photons coming from it, as this video from Rob Knop, below, demonstrates.
I’ll tell you so what: so if you’re looking for visible light for an object that’s really, really far away, you’re only going to see the light that was in the ultraviolet when it was emitted! All the visible light you were looking for? That’s been shifted into the infrared. So with Hubble — a telescope that was designed for visible light observations — you’re very limited as far as what you can see.
But things get even worse at very large distances.
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