We Are This Close To Seeing the Edge of the Universe

Consider that the universe has an edge. A physical place past where there is no universe. It is, somehow, a weirder concept to think about than that the universe has a beginning. Odd isn’t it? The edge of the universe seems to imply a vertigo-inducing and unknowable everything beyond it, while the beginning of the universe would seem to imply a simple nothing beyond it (or before it). Though, the catch is that time and space are so wrapped up together that beyond either that edge or that beginning is in a sense the same thing.

So when you consider the new farthest thing we have detected in the universe, an ultrabright Gamma Ray Burst discovered by UK astronomer Dr. Andrew Levan – and announced today via the University of Warwick – is 96-percent of the way to the edge of the universe, it’s also 96-percent of the way through time to the beginning of the universe. The GRB is 13.14 billion light years away from us—that is, it took its light 13.14 billion years to reach the Swift satellite telescope, which initially saw it in 2009. Meanwhile, the universe is 13.75 billion years old, so you can see where the math is coming from.

The GRB is also the oldest thing ever seen in the universe, though "old" becomes a tricky concept because Swift captured an image of something quite new and transitory: a GRB only lasts a couple of minutes, and the supernova it was likely a part of, likely collapsed afterward into a neutron star or black hole. In either case, it’s probably still in the universe in our "now," which we could observe from Earth in another 13.14 billion years (assuming the universe isn’t expanding, which it is).

"The race to find distant objects stems from the desire to find and study the first stars and galaxies that formed in the Universe, in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang," Levan says.

"By looking very far away, because the light takes so long on its journey to reach the Earth, astronomers are effectively able to look back in time to this early era. Unfortunately, the immense distances involved make this very challenging. There are different ways of finding such objects, looking at distant galaxies being the most obvious, but because galaxies are faint it is very difficult. GRB afterglows are so much brighter."

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv