Astronomers Discover Oldest Ever Galaxy

Fox News ^ | 1-26-11 | Staf

[Red Badger]

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have peered further back in time than ever before, spotting a galaxy that formed less than 500 million years after the birth of our universe, making it the oldest and most distant ever seen. The find, reported today (Jan. 26) in the journal Nature, should help astronomers better understand the early days of the universe, researchers said. In particular, the discovery should shed light on the evolution of early galaxies, which first formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang."In essence, the most important aspect of this is, it provides us with some sense of how fast galaxies are building up," lead author Rychard Bouwens, of the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and Leiden University in The Netherlands, told SPACE.com. "It provides a sort of measuring stick." Peering backward through time Bouwens and his colleagues analyzed observations made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

They looked at infrared data gathered by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed on the telescope in 2009. [Most Amazing Hubble Discoveries] The researchers found evidence of a galaxy with a redshift of 10.3. "Redshift" is a measure of how much the expansion of space has stretched an object's light to longer (or redder) wavelengths. Light from objects moving away from us shifts to the red end of the spectrum as its wavelengths are stretched. The shift, known as the Doppler phenomenon, is experienced on Earth when sound waves from an ambulance change pitch when the ambulance moves toward you versus away from you. Astronomers use redshift measurements to determine an object's distance, and by extension its age. The bigger the redshift, the greater the distance. A redshift of 10.3 corresponds to a distance of about 13.2 billion light-years. That is, it's taken 13.2 billion years for the light from the newly discovered galaxy - which has been named UDFj-39546284 - to reach us.

[ETL]

“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. ..."

For example, one light year, the *distance* light travels in a year at its constant speed of 186,000 miles per second, works out to about 6 TRILLION miles. And there are galaxies BILLIONS of light years away. This one supposedly is at 13.2 billion light years.

[Red Badger]

Your older brother was born a year after your parent’s marriage. You came along later. He’s still older than you...

[ETL]

if it was formed after our universe, wouldn’t that make it younger...wouldn’t that make our universe older?

Yes. The universe is thought to be about 14.7 billion years old. This galaxy, they say, formed about .5 billion years after the beginning of the universe.

[ETL]

Make that ‘the universe is thought to be about 13.7 billion years old’

[dragnet2]

I don't have any old car pics, but I shot the M-51 Whirlpool Galaxy from my backyard not long ago.

M-51 is about 37 million light years from earth.

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy is located in the Constellation Canes Venatici. Its companion galaxy, seen above the main spiral galaxy is NGC 5195, which is a spectacular example of interacting galaxies.

In this case NGC 5195 is being "ripped apart" by the huge gravitational disturbance of M51.

The distance of M51 is estimated to be about 37 million light years. The diameter is about 100,000 light years and the total mass is estimated to be the equivalent of 160 billion suns. The diameter is similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy.

I find galaxies to be fascinating.

Canon 40D/10"SMT/ Series of 35x120 second raw format exposures W/8 darks, @ISO 800/--A 6.3Focal reducer was used in the optical train with CLS-LP filters/calibrated, aligned and stacked w/DSS.

Bringing out the data in this image was not easy and I experienced some issues during processing.

[Red Badger]

That’s neat!...

[Lancey Howard]

Wow.. I can’t wait til next year when they see an even older one! And the year after that, and the year after that! Before long, they’ll spot one that was there before the birth of our universe.

[dragnet2]

Look at the image, that galaxy is many millions of light years far beyond those stars you see in the foreground surrounding the spiral structure of M51...

[Lancey Howard]

[dragnet2]

lol...

[Redcloak]

Nice! I can barely see M51 from my backyard. The only time I’ve ever had a dark sky here was when the Northridge quake knocked out all the power in the L.A. area.

[ETL]

Thanks! Amazing image.

Check out this incredible super-enlarged high-res image of the M51 ‘Whirlpool’ Galaxy:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Messier51_sRGB.jpg

[dragnet2]

When that was taken, it was 100 percent invisible to the unaided eye...Atmospheric conditions were not that good either, with upper level disturbances etc...Thanks.

[ETL]

Warning, warning!!! That high-res
image I linked to is a whopping 71MB!!!

[dragnet2]

LOL!

Thanks for the warning...I don’t think I’ll click on it...

BTW, I loved that show when I was a kid.

[ETL]

So did I. I thought the interchanges between Smitty and the Robot were hilarious.

I just learned recently that there’s a bench in Central Park here in NYC dedicated to Guy Williams, the actor that played John Robinson (no relation to you-know-who). :) The bench is near the statue of Columbus.

http://www.angelfire.com/amiga/guysbench/

[ETL]

If you’d like to reminisce, you can watch the series online for free here:

http://www.slashcontrol.com/free-tv-shows/lost-in-space

or here:
http://tv.yahoo.com/show/31829/videos

[beaversmom]

Reminds me of the conclusion at the end of this short video:

Size Of The Universe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0lxbzgwW7I

[dragnet2]

Very interesting read about Guy....I’d almost forgot about him.

Thanks.

[Ramius]

It’s really so very, very big.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, titular President of the Universe, was once punished by being put into the Infinite Field Vortex which is a machine that exposes you to the whole totality of the universe. The whole bigness. The entire infinity of galaxy after galaxy, trillions of worlds, unspeakable voids of billions of light-years of emptyness... the Whole Thing. Then... on a tiny microdot, on a microdot, on a microdot... way down into the infinite smallness of nothingness, is a little yellow arrow with a sign on it saying... “you are here.”

It normally reduces any thinking person to a shapeless mass of quivering flesh. Zaphod, however, has an ego so profound that it was able to expand to fill the entirety of the universe. When they opened the chamber back up he walked out, ran his fingers through his hair and said “Wow, big place.”