What is the most distant star?

At least 39 billion light years, but probably much farther and in my view quite likely infinitely far away. Before asking a question like this you have to understand that there isn't an easy way to answer it. You might also want to think a little more about what you meant when you asked it. Do you mean how far away is the most distant star that you can see with the naked eye? With a small telescope? With a large telescope? We cannot directly measure the vast distances in inter-galactic space, and we tackle the problem by estimation based on reasonable guesses. We have several different methods of expressing how far away things are when they are very, very far away. At first sight the methods don't necessarily agree with each other and that might confuse you. It confuses me. We don't know if the universe is finite or not, and if it is finite we don't know how big it is nor if it's staying that big. We don't even know if our measuring sticks are staying as big as we think they are from one day to the next. So to answer the question as it stands we'd need to put in a few get-out clauses, and if the universe really is infinite then the question is meaningless and it doesn't have an answer. I'm in the infinite universe camp, simply because nothing else seems to make sense to me. In intergalactic terms, one way of saying how far things are is by saying how long light would take to reach us from where we think the things are now. Unfortunately that doesn't give the same answer as how long the light that we are seeing now took to get here from where they were when they emitted it. Not even close, because most things are a LOT farther from us now than they were when they emitted the light that we see. Anyway, a light year is the distance light travels in a year. That's quite a long way as far as you and I are concerned, but in intergalactic terms it's a very tiny distance and we have to talk about billions of them. So let's suppose something was 13 billion light years away when it emitted some light, and now we're seeing that light. The thing that we're seeing (but since we're seeing it as it was 13 billion years ago, it might not even be there any more:) is quite possibly now 45 billion light years away. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe At the time of writing (January 2010), telescopes located in space are starting to produce new information which will probably change for ever our view of the universe: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/ Keep asking.

First answer by ID3523856419. Last edit by Jerry-bill. Contributor trust: 0 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 2 [recommend question].