Betelgeuse hysteria, Sliding astrology, and the farthest object in the Universe

The Huffington Post recently huffed about Betelgeuse - a red supergiant - going supernova in 2012 (of course!). And perhaps, we will be seeing two Suns for a period of time in 2012 - just like Tatooine from the Star Wars universe. Awww. Only if this was close to reality.

So I was called in at 93.9 - The River for a brief chat about this and about the recent news that astrology may be out of whack because of Earth's precession. Basically, all your horoscope months are off by about a  month (noooo!!). Here is the link to the chat- with ample dose of original Star Trek music by our morning host, Monte.

But on a more serious and awesome note, astronomers announced the discovery of the farthest galaxy known so far. Of course it goes by the sexy name of UDFj-39546284 and it was found in the ultra-deep field image in infra-red taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (that is what UDF stands for in the name). 

How far is the galaxy? About 13.2 billion light years from us! Yup. We are looking at a galaxy when the universe was only 480 million years old. Remember, the farther we look into space, the farther back we look back in time. This is because of the finite speed of light. So we are seeing this galaxy as it was 13.2 billion years ago - since light has taken 13.2 billion years to get to us. Many of the stars that we are seeing in this galaxy are dead by now. This is like a delayed transmission. Since the Big Bang happened about 13.7 billion years, this is indeed a very short time!

There is an excellent description of the galaxy and the way it was discovered at Bad Astronomy.