A space expert has taken Guinness World Records beyond its own neighborhood to highlight some amazing facts and figures that exist in the rest of the universe.
“If there was a Guinness World Records ‘Universe’ book, the records would be astonishing,” British physicist and BBC TV presenter Brian Cox says in a new video (below) released this week.
Racing through a long list of fascinating space-based records, Cox kicks off with “the most massive compact object,” a supermassive black hole, one of which was captured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope three years ago. M87, as it’s known, is 55 million light-years from Earth and has six billion times the mass of the sun.
Cox also reveals the fastest thing in the universe, the largest structure in the universe, and the smallest thing in the universe, among other records.
Asked about the most distant confirmed galaxy, the physicist named it as Glass-z13. “The time it’s taken the light to travel from it to the telescope is around 13.4 billion years. We’re looking at the galaxy as it was maybe 300 million years after the Big Bang, maybe 200 million.” With the expansion of the universe, Glass-z13 is just over 33 billion light-years from Earth.
The distant galaxy was discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, itself a record breaker for being the largest telescope of its kind ever built. Since its deployment earlier this year, the Webb telescope has been working to explore deep space, while at the same time beaming back to Earth some breathtaking imagery.
As Cox points out, the thing about records of the universe is that they’re changing all the time as astronomers and scientists constantly make new discoveries with increasingly powerful equipment like the Webb telescope. With that in mind, check out the video as soon as you can, or it’ll soon be out of date!
