Slashdot Mirror
The 1st Generation of Stars
Andy_Howell writes "Astronomers may have found members of the first generation of stars in the universe. Using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck I telescope, they observed a faint red blob that had been magnified into a double image by a gravitational lens. The blob was found to be a cluster of stars 13.6 billion light years away, seen when the age of the universe was less than a billion years old. The clump appears to contain only about a million stars, and is less than a few million years old. It is thought that swarms of these clumps came together over the age of the universe to create the galaxies we see today."
cool, very cool.
Nice to actually see where our universe came from...and weird to be looking so far back in the past!
Now for a serious question - what's with the red colour? If these stars were that new when they emitted this light, wouldn't they be bright blue?
...that this article did not mention the Big Bang.
If you are interested there is a spectacular book entitled _The_Big_Bang_Never_Happened_ that describes an alternate (and far more rational) cosmology...it posits that the universe is ruled by elecromagnetically active plasmas, and that the behaviors of our universe need not be explained by increasingly unlikely constructions.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Who wants cock?
:^)
:^)
Well you must be bored
On the other hand, when you initially post at +2, you have karma to burn...that, or you want to severely inconvenience some poor moderator who'll have to expend 3 mod points to get you down to -1
What if the universe were to wrap around itself, and we were actually staring at our backs? If there were some ultra-ultra-mega-super-densely packed gravity well or something in the center of our universe, we'd be going, "Man..thats an old ass.." but we'd be staring at our own and stuff.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
U GOTS TO B KIDDING ME..........BRITNEY SPEARS IS LIKE THE FIRST AND BESTEST EVER ... THERE AINT NO STARS B4 HER IN MY BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!! I LUV BILLY!!!!!!!
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I'm the decoy - Also known as a negative-mod-sponge.
OK, go on, explain it to me! From what I know, Doppler is when the source is moving relative to (in this case away from) the viewer. How can we be moving so fast to have an effect on light?!
There are tons of little red dots all over that image. How can they distinguish that those two are so special?
Go ahead and waste your life with your inhibitions, just don't ruin other people's lives with your intolerances.
Yeah, right...
Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes
Here's a link to the original [sciencenews.org] publishing of the article.
-Berj
...a link would be nice, please.
The blob was found to be a cluster of stars 13.6 billion light years away, seen when the age of the universe was less than a billion years old.
Perhaps I've been out of touch with my astronomy studies for too long, I know there are a lot of discoveries being made. However I was under the impression that there was still a great deal of uncertainty about the age of the universe. It was generally agreed that it was somewhere between about 13 billion and 20 billion years old but exactly how old wasn't/isn't clear.
Is there something I don't know about or is this age prediction just an assumption? Have there been some consensus on this recently that I didn't hear about? Anyone know for sure? I'm always suspicious when I see "discoveries" like this whose results depend on something that hasn't been definitely proven.
- Blob
- Cluster
- Clump
- Hemos
- Swarm
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I didn't realize /. automatically put the [destination] in the post, sorry for the repeat =)
-Berj
Once again I'll say it: astronomers kick butt. Who else can say with relative certainty what happened 13 billion years ago, and back up such claims with observational data?
Because it's not relative *constant* motion. Reputedly, due to the expansion of the universe, things father away appear to be moving away from use faster than things closer to us. This also means the light itself is being expaned -- shifted towards the red.
Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes
How many light-years across is the universe? If this light is really 13.6 billion years old, why didn't it pass the earth a long time ago? Shouldn't it be out re-defining the "edge of the universe"? Or maybe it's like the game astroids, where your ship goes off the edge of the map and reappears on the other side?
james
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Is there any application for this kind of astronomy?
If I were a director of federal astronomy I would enthusiastically fund near-galactic research that searched for wormholes, civilizations, planets that could support life, etc -- any kind of knowledge we need for a feasible star economy.
Basic science is nice, but erstwhile star captains probably wouldn't find the universe's origins very relevant.
Goat sex free since 2001
The blob was found to be a cluster of stars 13.6 billion light years away, seen when the age of the universe was less than a billion years old.
How is this possible? When the universe was less than a billion years old, then any two particles in it would have to be within two billion light years of each other, assuming the "big bang" model is true. It could not take light from one of them 13.6 billion years to reach the other.
What's wrong with my reasoning?
Yeah, I can imagine - and even then, i imagine many mods can't be arsed to waste more than half their mod points on someone with +2 to start with.
That said, i may just be bitter because I've never modded, despite being eligable. I think i actually have an activity level too high - they say they go for Joe Average, and I always hit the 2-minute limit. They obviously don't check against karma when deciding that one...sigh...oh, well.
I assumed it was a convention, not automatically added. I gave too much credit to the posters I guess.
-Berj
"Objects in mirror are larger than they appear."
I'm not an astronomer, but I'm familiar with many concepts. How do they determine how far away an extragalactic object is? I assume it has something to do with redshift and the Hubble constant. And a better question would be what is the margin of error for this? We know the basics of how the universe operates now, but how can we be sure once we go back a few billion years. Could someone who knows more about astronomy please answer this for me?
Is your boss an astronomer or something? Or are you just finding yourself strangely attracted to men with big telescopes?
Redshift would alter the base frequency as well, but the article mentions that it's due to the age of the stars.
I'm writing my thesis on the compressibility of floating-point numbers (an understudied aspect of computer science), and I need more Real-World data to study. Astronomy being a field requiring vast storage capacity this is the perfect data to use (and physics too if I could find it). Anyway, I need data to statistically analyze. Is the data for this project open, and where can more data be found? I'm primarily looking for LOOONG streams of floating-point numbers.
Thanks for any help you can give me.
My email is gcshaw@amherst.edu
What is the fasination with cyborg_monkey? From what I can gather, he is a complete dimwit.
Why would you claim to be his (her) monkey?
It is by observing the doplar shift, or "red shift", in the wavelength of a stars light that the length to almost every distant object is measured.
Think of yourself as being on the surface of an expanding baloon: relative to other objects that are close to you on the surface, you are moving very slowly. Relative to objects at the center of the baloon or halfway around the surface, you are moving a little faster (remember this is as the crow flies). Relative to objects clear on the other side of the baloon, you are moving the fastest of all.
On the scale of the universe, objects on the other side of the galaxy are moving extremely fast (relative to you). I'm not sure exactly how fast, but I remember reading somewhere that it is getting close to the speed of light (after all, they have had to cover a huge amount of space to get so far away). This is easily fast enough to have an affect on the wavelength of the light - even a small relative speed will have a small (but probably unmeasurable affect).
IANAAstroPhysicist, so whether this explains the visibly red shift (since scientific spectrographs are much more sensitive than our eyes ), I cannot say. Another explaination might be that the stars are young and therefore cool, but I couldn't say that for sure either.
I have no idea why you keep posting this (is it supposed to me ASCII art?) but it's definitely amusing.
I don't recall the actual length of visible light waves, but I think it's in non-microscopic units. At extreme distances, the expansion of the universe probably means our relative speed to those objects is extremely high. What we see as the red light may have started in the ultraviolet at the source . . .
Am I the only one who finds Gravitational Lenses to be kind of creepy? Photons leave a star on different paths, eventually become separated by many thousands of light years so that entire galaxies separate them, then get deflected so that they eventually converge to within inches of each other just as they hit the surface of planet earth. Those are are some tall odds.
Maybe this is a stupid question but...
How does a galaxy cluster bend light that started out before the galaxies were born?
I'm assuming that the light from the 13 billion year-old stars is travelling at light speed and that the galaxy cluster lenses are younger than 13 billion years. So how does the lens get ahead of the light and bend it? Has the light has been slowed down?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
In a later press release the scientist were quoted as saying, "Ooops! We thought we saw starts BILLIONS of miles away that had been magnified through a gravitational lense, but what we actually saw were some stains from an interns habit of dribbling coffee."
Excuse my cynicism (and my poor spelling), but they're trying to tell us that they're capturing light that was generated billions of years ago. Enough light to charge an optical receiver. I'm currently working on a project that has to generate laser light down a fiber, and pick up the signal after on a few miles, and we're having problems doing that. Occam's Razor applies here, and in my mind there are a mountain of explanations that fit better. Simple noise would be the first one. A body that is much closer but shrouded by some sort of haze is another. Even if space were nearly completely empty, wouldn't there be enough dust after a few zillion miles to make it opaque.
Just how much can we trust people claiming to see ghost (things that may very well be there, but no one else can see them)?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
"It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them." -Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Moody from the Department Mathematical Sciences, University of Alberta illustrates the importance of curiosity based research in his paper using lasers as an example of why curiosity based research is necessary.
Carl Sagan in his book, The Demon Haunted World, also stresses the importance of curiosity based research using James Clark Maxell's discoveries as an example of how it effects our lives today by providing the necessary building blocks for radio, television, computers, lasers, etc.
Basic science is nice, but erstwhile star captains probably wouldn't find the universe's origins very relevant.
It may not seem very relivant at first, but there are those who would argue in order to even begin to piece together data for a theory of everything (which may be vital to even approach the idea of star captains), we need to gather as much data as possible to reduce our error bars of knowledge.
All in all, Good question... I'm sure some of you have better answers...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
man shut up! until you start posting at -1 by default my allegiance is with cyborg_monkey (a her btw!).
piss off!
Any sign of a Starbucks?
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
A trivia point, for those interested. Helium was named for the sun, helios, first discovered when spectroscopy was very young. This element was not yet discovered on the earth and was thought only to be a "heavenly" element. That is until some researcher was told that if a piece of pitchblende was placed underwater, bubbles would form. He collected these gas bubbles in an inverted flask and analyzed them with the new spectroscope and found it to be helium.
Helium today mostly comes from mines. They are called mines and not wells because they produce a mineral but are essentially just like natural gas wells. This gas comes from radioactive decay which produces alpha particles---helium ions---which then capture electrons from its surrounding and becomes helium gas.
"The blob was found........."
;)
"The clump appears to......"
Is it just me or is Slashdot turning into less a tech website and more a B-movie?
What will they come up with next?
Great photo!! (Be sure to click on it to see the higher-res copy.)
It amazes me that there are so many galaxies that each of us could own one. If we each owned a galaxy, then each of us would own more stars than there are people on Earth.
There's plenty of energy in the universe, it's just not always where you need it.
ABC News article: "Abu Sayyaf
Bush's education improvements were
Most astronomers had previously ignored these stars, which had been modded down heavily for posting annoying "First star!" messages.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
The problem with "The Big Bang Never Happened" (which I have read) and other alternative cosmologies is that they don't even attempt to go deep enough to prove their points. There's a reason for this. All of modern cosmology is based on General Relativity. If you are going to say that the Big Bang Never Happened, then your alternative cosmology has to not only come up with an alternative explanation for the Universe, but also explain everything that GR does without having a Big Bang. This is a very tall order.
It isn't enough to point out the contradictions in the standard model. It is also necessary to build a new model that explains all observations. To date, no one has been able to do this without having a Big Bang at the start.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
//The blob was found to be a cluster of stars 13.6 billion light years away, seen when the age of the universe was less than a billion years old.//
Did we find out the exact age of the universe while I was on vacation or something? Why didn't someone tell me?
I sure hope that when someone discovers the meaning of life, or the existence of an afterlife that I'm not out of the loop on that one, too.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
I clicked on the text for the "German Gov't, Free Software, and Secure E-mail" story and this is the text that I got back from /. With the semi normal /. Look to it:
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
I broked it massa.
...The People's Republic of China launched their first intergalactic starship toward the red blob, on a mission to begin diplomatic relations with this clearly Communist star cluster.
One political analyst pointed out the remarkable similarity between the cluster and the birthmark on Mikhail Gorbachev's head.
Publication of a Little Red Datacube has been started in Shanghai.
Asikaa
Come in, twenty-seventy-seventy, your time is up.
Thank you. It's been awhile. I think I was thinking about sound waves and light waves at the same time. Audible sound waves (at least the bass ones, which are all I care about) are all in feet and inches . . .
The scienctific community constanty evangelizes science, studies, theories etc that can be backed up. As someone in the medical community, studies related to those strike home with me so I'll use those as a stepping stone here. We have COUNTLESS and i repeat COUNTLESS studies demonstrating that prayer to God in a DOUBLE BLIND, RANDOMIZED, and CONTROLLED experiments has a large (not 1 percent but on the orders of 25-50%) impact in a study (sure some studies didn't demonstrate it just like some studies have demonstrated that DiHydrogen Monoxide is dangerous). Simply doing a search in pubmed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi
With this body of evidence demonstrate that prayer works EVEN FOR PEOPLE WHO DO NOT NOW THEY ARE BEING PRAYED FOR, is it too much to inject into the creation of the universe debate the thought that PERHAPS God did create the universe like he claims to have done.
That is all.
"You can choose to follow God, or you can choose to not follow him--but to say he does not exist is to ignore the evidence"
A little definition for the problem always helps in its assessment.
It's spelt "antipasto" dumbass
What are the chances that the universe just appears in a humongous explosion all of a sudden? Hand of God, if you ask me. What are the chances that random amino acids in a primordial stew would turn into a furless, physically impotent, but uniquely rational creature? Had to be some greater influence there. We were made curious, and we act on it. And every time these discoveries come out, I am amazed that everything could be Just So, that human life could be brought about.
________
"And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion...." -- J.S. Mill
Call me crazy, but stars don't become even remotely useful until you get to approximately version 2 or 3. But hey, without a version 1 out there to kick up some FUD, Microsoft might take over the cosmos...so keep 'em coming I say!
OK, so I'm a coward.
Obviously you can't have young hydrogen-only stars unless the universe was different than it is today.
There are other possibilities.
The universe could be infinite and expanding (everything moving farther apart from each other), with new matter appearing in the voids created. If it expands in the right way, effects of a local event can propagate infinitely into new space (populated with new matter) without ever affecting anything that was a beyond a certain distance from the event at the time it happened.
Or the universe could be finite and self-refreshing on large or small scales. Setting aside the big bang/big crunch idea for the moment, matter and energy could "evaporate" at a rate relative to the gravitational constant in the area, to "condense" in areas with relatively low gravity, in a counter-entropic process that produces fresh hydrogen from worn out iron, neutronium, and um... blackholium?
We don't know the nature of our universe, or its origin, and never will be certain that we do. I don't consider natural history to be real science, any more than human history is. They are both certainly worthy pursuits, but are not built on the truly falsifiable claims which characterize science. I mean, you can assume that the laws of physics that work today applied before any human lived, but you can't test it.
I guess my point is that natural history has to be consistent with both current observation and physics, and we know our physics is incomplete. It's a bit early in the game to go chiseling events that happened billions of years ago onto stone tablets and ridiculing dissenters.
there will always be someone like you. there will always be people that believe thoes kinds of things, and that is unfortunate. even with the facts laid out, rite in front of their faces, they still choose not to accept them. i could go on for hours, or just show u a picture, to represent the indever of the religious fanatic:
j pg
http://geocities.com/x_bret_x/science-creation.
I remember when *my* star was that age, it was expanding as such a rapid rate, burning through hydrogen like there was no tomorrow... Heh... I can remember this time when Sol and a few of his buddies were hanging out in a bad part of the galaxy, and this black hole was trying to get them suck a nebulae. ha! I'll never forget that... ah... whew... guess you had to be there.... heh...
Oh well... screw all y'all... It was *funny*...
losers.
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
But I'm betting on the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, and the return of Zarquon.
"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want."
Thanks for the explanation. That's about the clearest answer I've heard to a question that's been bugging me for years.
Physics kicks ass, but it does get a bit tough on the noggin after a while.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
Science in general is irritating to me. If I remember correctly, which I probably don't, There is the hypothesis stage, the theory stage and with a lot of research and luck, you finally reach truth. It seems to me that science is stopping at the opinion stage of things and preaching it all as truth and universal gospel.
Therefore, science, please refrain from expressing your opinions as anything but such. When you have proof, call me and I'll care.
Hello? See the adequacy.org link in the .sig? Don't feed the trolls.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
On a related note, an astronomer from the University of Manitoba was on the radio last week arguing that our picture of star formation isn't entirely complete. From the sound of things, Jeans collapse (insert pants joke here) isn't an entirely adequate explanation. Anywho, the link for that report is below. Scroll down to the September 22nd show, the report starts 39.5 minutes into the broadcast.
s .h tm
http://www.radio.cbc.ca/programs/quirks/archive
Actually, it has nothing to do with how fast objects are moving away from us. The light is going through space (yes, that invisible substrate) which is expanding.
For an example of how this works, draw a wave on a large rubber band. Stretch the rubber band, the frequency of the wave decreases.
Anyway, it says in the article that the red color is probably because elements besides hydrogen hadn't been invented at the time.
Either way, it's a great photo.
Dust preferentially absorbs blue light, and allows red light to pass more easily. I occaisionally get it mixed up too! :)
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Am I missing something, or are the big bang theory and the postulate in this discovery announcement mutually exclusive? Assuming that we are looking backwards through time to "a cluster of stars 13.6 billion light years away, seen when the age of the universe was less than a billion years old", we (and all the mass of our part of the universe) would have had to have gotten 13.6 billion years away from this star cluster at a speed of something like 13.6/(13.6 + 1) * c = 0.93c in order to be observing the cluster at the age we are right now. This is obviously not happening. (I'm ignoring a few relativistic effects, but you get the idea.) This just proves that different parts of the Universe are coming into being, or matter is being organized, all the time. "My work is one eternal round."
...how is it possible to look that far back? I'm probably an idiot, but if the universe is, say, 14.6 billion years old, and this looks back 13.6 billion years, doesn't that mean that the light that we see now should've left the cluster a billion years ago? Now, our sun and earth come from the same point, Big Bang, and travelled at less than the speed of light for 13.6 billion years. And since light travels faster than matter, light from the cluster of stars less than a few million years old would travel to _far_ farther distance than our solar system by now.
What am I missing here?
It's probably the case that these are very hot stars with peak emission at blue or uv wavelengths. The reason for the red color is probably almost entirely due to the red shift of the objects, and possibly a small amount of interstellar dust (depending on how much intervening dust there is).
More often you see H-alpha emission from the gas clouds surrounding newly formed stars in star forming regions and such, it's somewhat rare (although not unheard of) to see strong hydrogen emission in a stellar atmosphere.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
A billion years here, a billion years there -- pretty soon you're talking serious timescales!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Am I missing something, or are the big bang theory and the postulate in this discovery announcement mutually exclusive? Assuming that we are looking backwards through time to "a cluster of stars 13.6 billion light years away, seen when the age of the universe was less than a billion years old", we (and all the mass of our part of the universe) would have had to have gotten 13.6 billion years away from this star cluster at a speed of something like 13.6/(13.6 + 1) * c = 0.93c in order to be observing the cluster at the age we are right now. This is obviously not happening. (I'm ignoring a few relativistic effects, but you get the idea.)
This just proves that different parts of the Universe are coming into being, or matter is being organized, all the time.
"My work is one eternal round."
As such 'advocates' of free speech, why is the Slashdot community so hypocritical as to censor an alternative view of the origin of life? I am always interested in alternate thinking; you should be as well, Slashdot moderators, since the majority of you advocate free and open thought.
The parent of this post in no way deserves the 0, Offtopic rating that it has been assigned (at the time of this posting), especially given carlcmc's posting record (there's a +5 in there, people.)
That's my opinion, at least. Mod down as necessary: -1, Insightful.
Do you like German cars?
I might be missing something, but isn't the postulate in this discovery mutually exclusive with the big bang theory? To get to our vantage point 13.6 billion years away from the viewed cluster, and be viewing things happening when the universe was less than a billion years old, we (and all the other mass in our part of the universe) would have to be moving away from the cluster at a rate of something like 13.6/(13.6+1)*c = 0.93c. Obviously this is not happening. (I'm ignoring a few relativistic effects, but you get the idea.)
Clearly then, matter is constantly being organized into new star systems in different parts of the universe.
"My work is one everlasting round."
I might be missing something, but isn't the postulate in this discovery mutually exclusive with the big bang theory? To get to our vantage point 13.6 billion years away from the viewed cluster, and be viewing things happening when the universe was less than a billion years old, we (and all the other mass in our part of the universe) would have to be moving away from the cluster at a rate of something like 13.6/(13.6+1)*c = 0.93c. Obviously this is not happening. (I'm ignoring a few relativistic effects, but you get the idea.)
Clearly then, matter is constantly being organized into new star systems in different parts of the universe.
"My work is one everlasting round."
Sorry for the horrible formatting, this is my first /. comment, and systems I've used otherplaces interpret CR/LF as BR tags. My bad, I guess. Is that an option I can turn on? I'll just look, I suppose.
.. Better Format:
It is thought that swarms of these clumps came together over the age of the universe to create the galaxies we see today.
I'm not a physicist, and I haven't read other comments or even the article, but I do question whether or not we could see the 'ancient' galaxies that we see today.
I think that they'd have to move faster than the speed of light, which is pretty much not groovy, at all. I doubt that galaxies, as a whole, know how to perform the Picard maneveur.
--Lambda Jedi
-- Lambda Jedi
Miles and miles of perfect skin,
I swear I said I fit right in.
Miles and miles of
In addition to the other post I can say that it is by the very definition microscopic. A microscope uses light to sense the object and the ideal microscope can resolve details only down to the wavelength of light involved. Therefore the wavelength of visible light is at the end of the resolution range of a visible light microscope.
Bingo! The article mentioned that this star cluster was found at a redshift of z=5.58 I believe. The formula of interest here is that
1+z=(Lamda_em - Lamda_ob)/Lamda_ob
This means that the light we observe from this star cluster is arriving at a bit less than a quarter of its original wavelength -- the red light seem in the picture was emitted as hard ultraviolet radiation from young massive stars! Yes, young stars are really hot.
If you think that's impressive, consider the quasars the Sloan Digital Sky Survey keeps finding out at z>6. We see them as faint red dots, but they are actually outshining entire galaxies, mostly in the form of hard X-rays. And then there's the cosmic microwave background, sitting out there at z~1300. That was once a sea of energetic photons, just slightly too cool to ionize all the hydrogen in the universe; now it is a 2.7 degree Kelvin hiss in your radio.
Executive summary: you'd better believe you can see cosmological redshifts.
Oh, and PS -- don't ever call it a "doppler shift", that really pisses off cosmologists (or at least the ones in my department). Doppler shifts are the result of objects moving toward/away from you emitting photons that are a different wavelength in your rest frame. In the case of cosmological redshifts, the objects in question are not only not moving away from us, but general relativity doesn't even have a concept of "relative velocities" on these scales. Instead, the photons are actually arriving with a different wavelength, because space expanded underneath them en route.
If you aren't sure there is a difference, try this thought experiment: an observer and an emitter are at relative rest in a static universe, when a photon is emitted. While the photon is in transit, the observer and emitter move farther apart, then come to rest again. The observer sees the photon at its original wavelength, since the motion occurred totally independantly of the photon. Now imagine that, while the photon was en route, the universe expands for a little while. The observer and emitter are in the same end state (i.e. farther apart and at relative rest), but the photon arrives with a reduced wavelength, because this time space expanded underneath the photon.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Personally, I think the universe is an illusion that will not ever really make sense. We may one day be able to travel it, but its origins will always remain unknown.
God has definitely done something... how can something be contained in nothing? How can God be contained in something? Questions like these make me think that the universe and our perception of physics are an illusion.
Even if we find the answer to the origins of the universe, those views will be only in human perception. Those may not be true spiritually to God.
I'm not saying that God is Allah or the Christian God or whoever, but I am saying that God tests our faith by placing a shield over our eyes. This is only our human perception.
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for
days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light
upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also -- Genesis 1:14-16
Truth is, the first Celestial body was Earth. If you really want to get into origins you have to go back to the Creator.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
On the scale of the universe, objects on the other side of the galaxy are moving extremely fast (relative to you). I'm not sure exactly how fast, but I remember reading somewhere that it is getting close to the speed of light
Do you mean "on the other side of the universe"? The most distant objects we've seen (usually quasars or groups of stars like the one being discussed) are indeed travelling away from us at appreciable fractions of the speed of light. However, at much smaller scales, ie the size of a galaxy, the Doppler shift due to the expansion of the universe is swamped by the motion of stars within the galaxy as they orbit its centre, and these velocities are miniscule compared to the speed of light. For example, we're about halfway out along one of the Milky Way's spiral arms. A star nearer the Galactic core, say a fifth of the way out, could appear to be coming towards us or moving away from us, depending on whether it was ahead of us or behind us in the direction of galactic rotation.
I was an astrophysicist, but I got a job as a computer programmer. It pays better.
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
Dr Ellis gave a talk here at school last night on this very topic. Very cool stuff. They're going to use the gravitational lensing to find out more about dark matter.
Another explaination might be that the stars are young and therefore cool, but I couldn't say that for sure either.
It turns out that there are certain spectral features (element emission/absorption lines) that occur at the same frequency no matter what temperature the object producing them is at. If this pattern of lines is shifted, you know that the colour is due to a real redshift and not a temperature difference.
I suppose that if something like Planck's constant was different at the time and location of the stars, that would also produce an emission line shift, but it's far more likely that the light has just been redshifted.
The effect of gravitational lensing depends on our alignment to the source. In a perfect or near perfect alignment (the case here), we see many rings and arcs. Slightly off we see arclets, followed by weak distortions. The closer to perfect alignment the better, as the magnification effect is stronger and rings, arcs, and mulitple images allow the calulation of mass and distance to both the source and the lensed matter.
You can find better explanations and animated examples by searching a bit on google.
You're right, and I believe for "nearer" objects, like those within our own galaxy, astronomers mostly use a technique where they measure the angle of the object in the sky twice - one half year apart so that, since we know the size of the earth's orbit, they can basically use the pathagorean theorum and calculate the distance.
:).
Again, IANAAstronomer (which is probably why I can't even recall the name of that technique