What about 13billion yr old galaxies? (Score 1)

I don't understand why this is such big news. There are pictures of galaxies that go back to less than a billion years after the big bang, i.e about 13 billion years. Here's one: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4756. Now that is fricking amazing. There are better photos, I just did a quick Google to get this one.

When the light left those galaxies/quasars/whatever 13 billion years ago, the universe was much smaller than it is now. So that 13 billion light year radius sphere surrounding us was only a 500 million light year sphere at the time, yet the light has taken 13 billion year to get here. (Actually, the universe is not really a sphere. It's some warped dimensional thing that I can't possibly understand.)

So what's the big deal about 1 billion light years?