The new record for the farthest object whose distance was directly measured is 450 million light years with an uncertainty of no more than 9 percent.
Our Milky Way galaxy is only 100,000 light years across. 450 million light years is more than four thousand times the diameter of our galaxy. Our “local” Supercluster centered on Virgo is only 150 million light years across – one-third of the new distance measurement record.
This was set by the world’s largest telescope, the Very Large Baseline Array telescope (VLBA) which extends from Hawaii to New Hampshire, and boasts a resolution a hundred times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.
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