World Scene: Space

Most distant object is smudge

Astronomers tracking a blast of energy called a gamma ray burst said on Tuesday they had snapped a photograph of the most distant object in the universe - a smudge 13 billion light-years away.

Hawaii's Gemini Observatory caught the image earlier this month after a satellite first detected the burst. "Our infrared observations suggested that this was an unusually distant burst, these images were the smoking gun," said Edo Berger of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Distortions in the light signature of the object show it is 13 billion years old - at the speed of light, 13 billion light-years away. A light-year is 10 trillion km. This makes it easily the most distant object ever seen by humanity, Berger said.

(China Daily 04/30/2009 page10)