Seriously!  I really think it is, because the last time I heard about astronomical units of measure like this I was watching Star Trek!

Anyway, news out today says that the Hubble’s actually picked up some of the oldest galaxies ever seen.  And by any decent standard, these are monstrously old.  How old?  Their age is placed at somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion years after the start of the universe.

You might be asking how anyone could get a reliable estimate of the age of a galaxy–turns out it’s a function of distance.  This goes back to what I said earlier, as these galaxies are supposedly about thirteen billion light years away from Earth.  It would take light thirteen billion years to get there.

But, the sad news…this is about the limit of Hubble’s range.  There’s actually some whisperings that say that the next space telescope can see stuff that was around merely one hundred million years after the big bang, which, relatively speaking, means we’re actually closing in on the end of the universe.

What I’d personally love to see is to turn Hubble in like a three hundred sixty degree sphere and make the first ever star map going in all directions at that range.  But I kind of doubt anyone’s going to try that any time soon.