Newest, oldest, furthest

[unixronin]

Newest oldest:  Two weeks ago, astronomers located a distant galaxy at red shift 7.0 dating from only 750 million years after the Big Bang.  That two-week-old record has now been broken by a new most distant object, Abell 1835 IR1916, a faint galaxy just discovered with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile witht he aid of gravitational lensing. Abell 1835 IR1916 appears to be 13.2 billion light-years away at red shift 10.  If so, we are seeing it as it was only 460 million years after the Big Bang, making it possibly one of the very first galaxies.

In other astronomical news, the ESA's Rosetta comet-chaser probe was successfully launched yesterday from Kourou, French Guiana.  Rosetta will rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, after three gravitational-slingshot passes by Earth, one by Mars, two passes through the asteroid belt, and an orbit-matching engine burn in 2011.  In the process, it will double (to around 800 million miles) the record recently set by NASA's Stardust mission for the furthest distance travelled from the Sun by a solar-powered spacecraft.