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Earliest Stellar Objects Found

Posted by chrisd on from the virtual-classes-for-the-universe dept.

Microsofts slave writes "Scientists belive that they have found the earliest objects (new zork times registration required) in space. 26 galaxies and three quasars were observed at thirteen billion light years away, at time when the universe is belived to have been only 1 billion years old."

7 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Infocom? by CableModemSniper · · Score: 3, Funny

    A yes, the new Zork times, a very reputable paper.

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  2. God /. Just use the google partner thing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    No Reg required

  3. weird by Tuxinatorium · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Scientists belive that they have found the earliest objects (new zork times registration required) in space. 26 galaxies and three quasars were observed at thirteen billion light years away, at time when the universe is belived to have been only 1 billion years old."

    If so, that means the average rate of expansion of the universe since that time had to be at least 4/5 C... Unless our physics model is flawed on the large scale, whish it probably is... Who knows, maybe the observed outward acceleration of the universe is due to a force many orders of magnitude weaker than gravity but repelling and inversely proportional to R instead of R^2 so it would be important on the extremely large scale but unnoticeable on the scale of individual galaxies... That would fubar all our redshift measurements and wreak havoc on our largely speculative cosmological model... who knows...

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    1. Re:weird by Alsee · · Score: 3, Funny

      The anthropic principle is cool. I always wanted to start a cult around it

      Ah, yes. You will worship me as an all-powerful cult leader and give me all your money because if I weren't an all-powerful cult leader then there wouldn't have been a cult in the first place. Hehe

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  4. Dumb cosmology question? by MacAndrew · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If everything started with a Big Bang from a singularity roughly 10-20 billion years ago, how is it that things came to be physcially 13 billion or more light years apart? I understand that the "Doppler" redshift is caused by great speed away from us. But is the universe seriously expanding at anything near lightspeed?

    Some suggest that initial expansion was faster than light speed, and that the Hubble expansion is accelerating.

    1. Re:Dumb cosmology question? by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Informative
      But is the universe seriously expanding at anything near lightspeed?
      The universe seems to be open, which means it's infinite in extent. However, we can only observe a finite part of it, because light from more distant parts hasn't had time to get to us since the Big Bang. Stuff very far away from us, beyond what's observable to us, is theoretically moving at greater than the speed of light relative to us.

      IIRC, in standard cosmological models the stuff at the edge of the observable universe is moving away from us at exactly the speed of light.

      You can also think of the expansion as a growth of space itself, not just the motion of galaxies away from each other.

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  5. mistake in title by bcrowell · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Earliest Stellar Objects" is a mistake. The article is about quasars and galaxies.

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