376. A GRB detected at z=8.3
ASTRO — By Dmitry Podolsky on April 28, 2009 at 2:50 pm
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Dmitry Podolsky has got his PhD from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He currently works as postdoc at Case Western Reserve University. He is also one of the editors of NEQNET.
… which makes it, as it seems, the most distant object in the Universe observed so far – see the Swift page (that’s the spacecraft that originally detected the GRB on Apr 23) on the NASA site for technical details or this article on New Scientist site for general discussion.
That’s the guy.
Do you find it ironic that we can detect CMB photons from the last scattering surface (400000 years after the Big Bang, 
) and photons from objects like GRB 090423 at 
(640 million years after the Big Bang) but not so much in between? (The only radiation emitted during those Dark Ages is 21 cm neutral H line.) Is it really true that nothing interesting happened in the Universe for those 600 million years? Deep in my heart I seriously doubt that.
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Don’t you think that it is, on the contrary, very reasonable to “generously” give the Universe those 600 million years to relax before first structure formation took place? I am afraid that Universe took this vacation time even if someone doesn’t wish so.
If the Universe had to do many other things during all those years, it would really be incorrect to assume that it was ever uniform and free of structures. And there would be no reason to think that the CMB remained so uniform etc.
Hi Lubos,
Sure, that’s what general lore says. Though, structure formation starts from random initial conditions – there were rare large fluctuations of
in our huge universe, so I am sure that we will find more GRBs at larger redshifts with better instruments 
Still, that sounds too boring.
That’s not really an argument since all the LSS (with
) formed during last 13 billion years does not really influence uniformity of CMB, does it? 
But you are right suggesting that I don’t have anything in my pocket to show except my severe disappointment by how life actually works 
Another boring thing in physics: take an interval of energies before 1 TeV and GUT scale, that’s quite a long interval, isn’t it? The suggestion that there is no really interesting physics in this interval (compared to, say, the interval between
eV and 1 TeV 
) seems extremely boring to me 
Cheers,
Dmitry.
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