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Interferometer Spots Galaxy at 40M Lightyears
techno-vampire writes "JPL announces that a pair of telescopes used as an optical interferometer have detected a galaxy 40 million light years away, smashing the previous record of 3,000 light years. This feat, using infrared, has given us a far more detailed look into the center of a galaxy, and opened up a whole new field of research."
Ah, that explains.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
The important point here is that they were able to use the two Keck "big guns" together to simulate the resolution of a much bigger telescope. Until recently, only bright stars were bright enough to make these sort of observations. The Keck and ESO interferometers are light-years ahead both because of their large mirrors and because they're using advanced image correction via small, flexible mirrors to correct for the distortion caused by our atmosphere. This makes the light train much more coherent and makes it much easier to get good interference patterns. Therefore they can observe much fainter objects.
Everything in the universe is moving away from everything else. A "two-dimensional" model should help you get this.
Imagine a balloon. Now, imagine dots on the outer surface of the balloon that represent galaxies and other matter. These objects exist on the two-dimensional plane that is the outer surface. It is curved slightly in three dimensions, but from the point of view of the dots, they don't notice this (they can't percieve this third dimension).
Now, imagine if I blew the balloon up. The dots move away from each other and space expands between the dots. The balloon universe is expanding, but where is the center? There is no center.
This holds true for our own universe. The universe is expanding in more than three dimensions. Basically, the space between the stars and galaxies is expanding. Therefore, there is no "center" of the universe.
It's the deepest detection by interferometer. It's just a spot, though. Hubble's Deep Field images are more fun to look at. And with multiple passes, it's even pretty. These three have a lot to say about this subject.
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