Telescope Buying Guide

The Impressive Empress asked:


Yahoo! News reports: “The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe — just 600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler.”

How is this possible?

Raymond asked:


I don’t quite understand how they determine that the galaxies in some ultra-deep-field pictures are billions of years old… How do they determine that? How do they know that they are looking into the past of the universe? If they determine that the distance of the galaxies is, for example, 13 billion light years, that means that the light the telescope is able to capture has been traveling for 13 billion years, right? But then how is it that they determine that those are the early galaxies in the universe and that those galaxies were formed soon after the Big Bang? Can someone please explain with simple and easy-to-understand terms? Maybe some examples? Thanks!

Noname asked:


Forgive my ignorance at this.
If the hubble space telescope is seeing the early universe from billions of light years away, is our galaxy traveling at almost the speed of light away from the point where big bang occurred?

for example:
an explosion or a black hole was detected by hubble from around 14 billion light years away and our galaxy was already at this point(here). So we are seeing what is happening at 14 billion years ago at yet our galaxy must have came from that part where the explosion begins..

Sorry bout that, can’t explain further.

phantomknightlad asked:


I heard that the hubble telescope is able to see the universe just after it was born. I do not see how this is possible because I figure the light from the initial big bang would have passed by earth long ago. Are we seeing a slower form of light, or am I just missing something?