Oldest galaxy

13.1 billion years old and looking good.

[snipped from ITN video ]

so is oldest the further one? i read about the fact that the universe we see now could be only just a little part of what it was in the past. now we see only what the speed of light let us see. interesting facts. cool picture, thanks

how much further away does it have to be ,  before we can no longer see it ?

for instance , would aliens in the galaxy behind us ( in this line of vision ) be able to see it ?

@EdyEdd, yes, oldest that we can see is the furthest that we can see (as the time in the past is exactly the number of light years away). I understand that it is accepted there is a lot of the Universe we can never see. While such galaxies are further away, they can still not be older than the big bang. Since we can never see them by any means, there is not much science to be done! The sample of the Universe that we cannot see is generally taken to be very similar to the parts we can see. I am not sure that is even a scientific statement, since there is no feasible experiment to check it!

Yes, smiffy, I would infer that for aliens in a different galaxy, the patch of the Universe that they can see would be somewhat different to ours, overlapping but not equal. In one direction we can see some galaxies that they cannot, in the opposite direction, they can see some galaxies that we cannot. [This discussion is helping my understanding of this, so thanks!]

Oops - glancing at this again it occurred to me that my statement about the time ago and the distance being the same was nonsense. The expansion of the Universe has made the oldest galaxies about 40 billion light years away (about 3 times their age).

I belive that we cannot see much farther than the galaxy in question because before galaxies were first formed there was mostly non-luminous gas which made up most of the mass of the universe the so called dark ages.

Aliens in that part of the universe currently would be looking back at our galaxy at the same look-back time. So they would see our huge giant blob of gas.

What you say is basically true, but it is worth pointing out:

(1) the oldest visible galaxies are now around 90% of the way back to the big bang

(2) we can see the era before galaxy formation as the cosmic microwave background

The 38 meter diameter of new teleskope of ESA is in construction. With that one lot of more things should be seen. Peaty that 100m diameter telescope was too expensive for construction. That will be next generation.