Saturday, October 9, 2010

which is the star most distant we detected ?

The most distant star ever detected no longer exists, as it was detected as a supernova [named (ESO8802)]. Observations show that the cluster known as AC118 within which the star existed is at a distance of about 5 billion light-years (1 billion = 1000 million). Thus this supernova explosion occurred 5 billion years ago, or about the time when the Sun and the planets were born. (It is the most distant supernova observed so far . . .The large Magellanic cloud is 157000 light years away, I believe that big telescopes can separate the stars there but the are not given names.

The most distant stars in the milky way that can be seen are about 30/40 thousand LY away but again they are not given names.

Some galaxies are 13 billion LY away but although we see the galaxies we cannot separate the individual stars . . .This is an impossible question to answer because the farthest objects seen by our telescopes are not stars but whole galaxies each containing billions of stars. We can see individual stars in nearby galaxies, but these are relatively close to us . . .The most recent images of the Andromeda galaxy in ultraviolet light are good enough to see individual stars, and that's 2.5 million light years away . . .