• Question: What Is the farest thing a telescope can see? I heard telescopes can see up to 15,000 light years!

    Asked by iscientist to Chris, Eva, Michael, Paddy, Philip on 17 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Chris Jordan

      Chris Jordan answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Quasars are thought to be the most distant things we can see, they were first discovered with radio telescopes and the record is currently 12.8 billion light years. They are VERY bright and apparently there’s one that’s 2.4 billion light years away that you could see with binoculars.

    • Photo: Eva Bachmair

      Eva Bachmair answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Wow, I didn’t know that. And with Chris we got the best answer.

    • Photo: Philip Denniff

      Philip Denniff answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      As Eva sad WOW.
      That must be bright as sun light only takes 8.3 seconds to reach us. I cant even begin to work out how much brighter than the sun it must be. I know it must be really big number.

    • Photo: Michael Wharmby

      Michael Wharmby answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Impressive! Makes you realise quite how small we all are when you talk about those numbers, Chris.
      One thing to add though, what we can see with our eyes is different to what we can observe. Due to all the things in the galaxy racing apart light coming from far away stars changes, it shifts towards red and then towards infra-red, microwave and finally radiowave. If we use a different detector we can see further away things.
      Likewise we can still see energy from the big bang (13.7 billion years ago) by looking at the sky with a microwave detector. I don’t understand much more than this, but there’s a pretty picture here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_radiation :-p

    • Photo: Paddy Brock

      Paddy Brock answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Nice! I’m learning lots about space this week.

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