Travel time = 13 billions years

By 8 commentsScience, , ,

When the gamma ray arrived at Earth last Thursday, it travelled 13 billions years. Wooooow MAN Wooooow 🙂 .

The gamma ray originated from the explosion of the star that CNN reported could be up to 100 times larger than the Sun, had travelled 13 billion years to reach us. And at that time our loving universe was only 600 million years old. That means this then ‘exploding star’ is one of the earliest objects after the ‘Big Bang’.

So can we now make a calculation when approximately we will be flying around it? 🙂 .

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8 comments on “Travel time = 13 billions years”

  1. Andrew Cheong

    I am a little puzzle about the figures and the speed of light.

    If we believe in the Big Bang Theory, what we believe in is that the universe begins at a single point at time zero, and objects are thrown at random and settled down where we are today.

    Considering the fact(?) that speed of light is the fastest speed in the universe, solid matter travels at a much slower speed, how is it that we arrive where we are at least 13 billions years earlier, considering that the object was only 600 million years old when it exploded?

    How old is the universe anyway?

  2. Shams

    I think the travel time calculation is correct as it must be well-calculated. But the age of the Universe??

    I guess till some years before it was calculated to be 6 billion years old, and now 13 billion years. The age of the universe is expanding :-).

    But I believe it will remain as a mystery for many more years. Because more deeper scientists will go, more new discoveries they will make about our universe.

    So wait some 13 billion years more to get the correct answer, Andrew :-).

  3. Rajeev

    I am as curious about this as Andrew is. If nothing can travel as fast as light and if the star exploded before we came into existence how did the light reach us just now. It should have long gone past us unless it is moving in elleptical circles continuously all around us…

    Either that or the star exploded 13 billion years away from us (more distant from us than singularity) and it is the radition travelled backwards to us. That would make the universe > 13 billion years old but then again the read age of the universe should almost be twie that (given it has taken a few billion years for the star to explode where it is and then 13 billion years after explosion) Either ways I am pretty confused.

  4. vesposito

    Relativistic effects due to the expansion of space between us and the object in question make distance/age calculations somewhat complex- you have to account for the effect of time dilation on the light from the object itself, as well as the fact that in 13 billion years, the space between us and the object has expanded a great deal- these effects, however, are fairly well understood, so I would suspect that they have been accounted for.

    The age of the universe is estimated to be about 13.7 to 14 billion years. That means that this GRB probably marks the end of the one of the first generations of stars to exist.

    It boggles the mind to think that our solar system didn’t exist when the gamma ray burst happened- it took so long for the light to reach this point in sapcetime that the solar system had time to form, and for life to evolve.

  5. Spot

    Think of a bubble expanding at half the speed of light objects on opposite sides of that expanding bubble would effectively be travelling away from each other at the speed of light

  6. Alexander Jenner

    Remember that although the fastest velocity that radiation can travel is indeed the speed of light that does not limit the speed of expansion of the Universe. During the period of cosmic inflation the universe expanded at a rate greater than the speed of light. The Hubble Constant is 70km/s/Mpc (Megaparsecs), which means that at a great enough distance from us objects are receding at greater than the speed of light today as well.

  7. Chirag Shah

    As the Universe was/is in process of expansion since the big bang for 13 Billion years,the matter and light would be travelling at almost the same speed at the time of explosion of the star, also, as the explosion would also continue for a long time, with radiation continuing for same time. I think we are in the middle of the radiation and will continue measuring it.

    (non sientific view of mine)

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