Time is kind of funny when you look at such distances. Let's imagine that you are running away from a person throwing a ball at you. The ball will travel further to hit you, based on your speed, than the distance that was present when you started to run.
The universe is expanding. The early Universe expanded very quickly, giving large deviations from the expected position today than what we see through a telescope. Something that we see that is 12 billion years old is actually quite a bit further away today, although we can't know exactly where it is. As I understand, this hypothetical object would be around 40 billion light years away today (See this question), given current theories.
But yes, if you looked at a galaxy that appears in today's distance to be 13 billion light years away, then the universe was 800 million year old, roughly speaking. Galaxies took about a billion years to form, however, so you probably wouldn't see such a galaxy.
No comments:
Post a Comment