Astronomers Discover Oldest Galaxy Yet
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Hyde Parke
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Hubble spots most ancient galaxy to date
Updated 13m ago | Comments 4 | Recommend E-mail | Save | Print | Reprints & Permissions |
This is the image of the sky in the region of the Hubble Ultra-Deep field taken with the new Wide Field Camera 3 Infra-red imager (WFC3/IR). It's the deepest image of the sky ever obtained in the near-infrared.
Hubble space telescope astronomers Wednesday unveiled a view of a galaxy that took shape within 480 million years of the Big Bang, offering a glimpse of the universe as it gave birth to its first stars.
Galaxies are the vast archipelagoes of stars filling space, such as our own spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy. The new "UDFj-39546284" galaxy is the most distant and ancient one yet spotted by astronomers.
Roughly 10 times smaller than the Milky Way galaxy, the new star-packed discovery confirms that a period of rapid star-birth unfolded in the era after the Big Bang, which took place about 13.75 billion years ago.
"The nighttime sky would have looked very different then," says study lead author Rychard Bouwens of the University of California Santa Cruz.
Massive blue stars created by dense clouds of hydrogen gas would have been born and died within millions of years' time, quick by cosmic standards, their death blasts filling space with charged, radioactive particles. "Probably, it wouldn't have been a very healthy time for life, if planets even existed then," Bouwens adds.
The report, in this week's edition of the journal Nature, shows stars formed in the galaxy at a rate 10 times slower than they did in galaxies only slightly older, ones dating to about 700 million years after the Big Bang. Those galaxies themselves were much busier star factories than today's comparatively quiet ones.
Newly installed instruments aboard the Hubble space telescope, 30 times more sensitive than their predecessors, allowed astronomers to peer deeply into space to find the galaxy, one of 6,000 contained in a "deep-field" view collected over 100 hours of telescope viewing time. "We have pushed Hubble about as far back as it can go," Bouwens adds.
"Just as archaeologists sift through deeper layers of sand to uncover the past, cosmologists use large telescopes and sensitive detectors to study galaxies at ever greater distances from Earth," says Naveen Reddy of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, in a commentary on the study. Because the speed of light, 5.9 trillion miles per year, is finite, he notes, looking at more and more distant stars allows astronomers to "peer farther back in time."
Discovery of UDFj-39546284, Reddy adds, "paves the way for a bright future in studying faint and distant galaxies." A better look at the era of the first stars will most likely come from NASA's troubled James Webb Space Telescope, which the space agency announced late last year was about $1.5 billion over budget, pointing to a total cost of $6.5 billion and a 2015 launch.
Once launched, the bigger mirrors and near-infrared spectrum sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope should allow a full survey of the first galaxies, now established as ripe for observation by Hubble's latest discovery.
Updated 13m ago | Comments 4 | Recommend E-mail | Save | Print | Reprints & Permissions |
This is the image of the sky in the region of the Hubble Ultra-Deep field taken with the new Wide Field Camera 3 Infra-red imager (WFC3/IR). It's the deepest image of the sky ever obtained in the near-infrared.
Hubble space telescope astronomers Wednesday unveiled a view of a galaxy that took shape within 480 million years of the Big Bang, offering a glimpse of the universe as it gave birth to its first stars.
Galaxies are the vast archipelagoes of stars filling space, such as our own spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy. The new "UDFj-39546284" galaxy is the most distant and ancient one yet spotted by astronomers.
Roughly 10 times smaller than the Milky Way galaxy, the new star-packed discovery confirms that a period of rapid star-birth unfolded in the era after the Big Bang, which took place about 13.75 billion years ago.
"The nighttime sky would have looked very different then," says study lead author Rychard Bouwens of the University of California Santa Cruz.
Massive blue stars created by dense clouds of hydrogen gas would have been born and died within millions of years' time, quick by cosmic standards, their death blasts filling space with charged, radioactive particles. "Probably, it wouldn't have been a very healthy time for life, if planets even existed then," Bouwens adds.
The report, in this week's edition of the journal Nature, shows stars formed in the galaxy at a rate 10 times slower than they did in galaxies only slightly older, ones dating to about 700 million years after the Big Bang. Those galaxies themselves were much busier star factories than today's comparatively quiet ones.
Newly installed instruments aboard the Hubble space telescope, 30 times more sensitive than their predecessors, allowed astronomers to peer deeply into space to find the galaxy, one of 6,000 contained in a "deep-field" view collected over 100 hours of telescope viewing time. "We have pushed Hubble about as far back as it can go," Bouwens adds.
"Just as archaeologists sift through deeper layers of sand to uncover the past, cosmologists use large telescopes and sensitive detectors to study galaxies at ever greater distances from Earth," says Naveen Reddy of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, in a commentary on the study. Because the speed of light, 5.9 trillion miles per year, is finite, he notes, looking at more and more distant stars allows astronomers to "peer farther back in time."
Discovery of UDFj-39546284, Reddy adds, "paves the way for a bright future in studying faint and distant galaxies." A better look at the era of the first stars will most likely come from NASA's troubled James Webb Space Telescope, which the space agency announced late last year was about $1.5 billion over budget, pointing to a total cost of $6.5 billion and a 2015 launch.
Once launched, the bigger mirrors and near-infrared spectrum sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope should allow a full survey of the first galaxies, now established as ripe for observation by Hubble's latest discovery.
Comments
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i cant upload the pic for some reason.
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Picture of the galaxy. -
Nice find......
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thats crazy, you we we ain't the only was living in this & the next galaxy. real talk.
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good ? . but if they dont find us before we find them, it dont really mean nothing. u can find all the ? thats out there, but if you dont reach life, its pointless right about now. and if they find us first, we're in TRO-BLE. TRAH-BOL.
Because they are more advance and can ? all our ? and move on to the next. -
*************Justa Phella wrote: »thats crazy, you we we ain't the only was living in this & the next galaxy. real talk.
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