Wasn't it Stephen Hawking, surely no hopped-up cosmic fiction scribe with a head full of implausible ideas, that said we probably don't want to contact What's Out There, as What we find most certainly won't be benevolent Star Trek aliens speaking English and offering us tours of their planets (that look surprisingly like the Santa Monica Mountains, and/or Hazzard County)?Methinks some of those we came before us were more "Seers" than just merely "Writers."
The link to the article written by Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer, courtesy of Yahoo News:
Astronomers believe they've found the oldest thing they've ever seen in the universe: It's a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago.
Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That's a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far.
By now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn't exist in its earlier form and has already merged into bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"We're looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age," said California Institute of Technology astronomy professor Richard Ellis, who wasn't part of the discovery team. "In human terms, we're looking at a 4-year-old boy in the life span of an adult."
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"Twinkle, twinkle, little star...
How I wonder what you are..."
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