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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."
What about the Hubble Deep Field images that showed galaxies as much as 13 billion light years away?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I wish I could tell you the difference between the two, but I'm just now looking it up myself. Obviously, we've "detected" objects much, much, much further away. Even more importantly, we even have "Artist's Depictions" of those too!
I wonder if that's far enough to find the people who find overlords jokes funny.
"Derp de derp."
To hopefully help quell the rush of prople who don't RTFA. Because the post is a bit. . .misleading.
"NGC 4151 is 40 million light years from Earth, far beyond the most distant object previously detected by this type of telescope system, which was about 3,000 light years from Earth."
"this type of telescope system"
They are refering SPECIFICALLY to the technique used to image this. NOT 'most distant object imaged'.
Building a better backup.
Zettabyte Storage
From things I've read, everything in the universe seems to be moving away from something and expanding. So, where is the "center", what's in it?
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Transwarp conduits seem to vary in speed greatly. In TNG episode "Decsent" the Enterprise entered a pre-layed Borg transwarp conduit and covered 65 lightyears in about nine seconds, a speed of around 200,000,000 c, or 8.125 lightyears per second(!). At that speed transwarp could take you across our galaxy in roughly 6 hours! But to cross 400,000,000 lightyears, it would take roughly 1 and a half years. Gives you an idea on how much empty space there is between galaxies, huh?
That said, we're talking about a pre-layed conduit. Star Trek established during Voyager that transwarp conduits must be layed by a vessel before they can be traveled at 200,000,000 c. The process of traveling at transwarp and laying a new conduit in your wake is much slower than traveling across a premade one. Creating a new conduit also varies in speed greatly. At it's slowest in Star Trek history, we've seen it go at roughly 100,000 c, or 13.7 light years per hour. At it's fastest in Star Trek history, we've seen it go at roughly 1,500,000 c, or 2.3148^ light years per minute. By taking the mean of these two extremes, it's reasonable to assume that the average speed of transwarp speed non prelayed conduit is 800,000 c, or 3.6 light years per minute.
So, to answer your question, since no one has yet layed a transwarp conduit to the galaxy in question (or maybe we just can't find it?), it would take 211.3 years of transwarp at 3.6 light years per second (the average) to travel the 400,000,000 light years to get there.
Considering the fact that we're talking about 24th century hypothetical technology and even that won't get you there very quickly, don't plan on taking your next vacation there.
(Disclaimer: Keep in mind that these calculations are heavily rounded and generalized and I threw them all together relatively quickly.)
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
God damn it. I knew something was off with that distance. It's 40,000,000 light years not 400,000,000.
So with a prelayed conduit that'd be just under 2 months and making a new conduit it would be 21.1 years of transwarp. Sorry about that. Well I guess if we ever invent the technology it isn't so unrealistic after all, is it?
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I would like to see an array of cheap telescopes stationed at the LaGrangian points to do interferometry at any wavelength. Gravity wave detection could also be included in the mix. There would be no need for elaborate vibration damping and not being limited to the simple L shape that current ground based gravity detectors use, we would be able to triangulate gravity wave disturbances in 3 dimensions!
Transwarp conduits seem to vary in speed greatly.
:-P
Depending on what is called for in the script
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Actually, if you sit down and look at every episode of the various different series that involve transwarp, you begin to see a pattern of which I described in my initial reply. If you discredit the utter ridiculously scientific nonsense in "Voyager: Threshold" regarding transwarp theory, it all falls into place. (Besides, Tom Paris in a later episode tells Seven of Nine that he'd never flown at Transwarp which seems to decannonize "Threshold" in the first place.)
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Our own milky way is about 100,000 light years across, so
that 3,000 light year number is at least a few orders of
magnitude off. WTF?
-Quote thanks to NASA
The closest galaxy is over25 times farther away than 3,000 light years.
...space was supposedly full before it started expanding. It has been cooling, in theory, because of the expansion of space itself rather than the expansion of matter within space.
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Not far from us, it turns out. The galaxies in our universe are arranged, loosely, in concentric shells. The center about which these shells are con happens to be not far outside our own galaxy.
Lots of scientists pooh-pooh the idea, not because they've examined the data but because they're allergic to the philosophical implications of this. A few others have made genuine attempts to examine and refute the data, so far without success. We need more scientists to find new approaches to falsification, because unless this can be falsified it revolutionises our entire approach to cosmology (and clears out dozens of now-failed cosmological theories at a stroke).
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The closest galaxy is (quote taken from here):
Oops. If I had paid attention I would have noticed that I was scooped by 12 hours here.
One of the things he noticed was that galaxies happen in statistically significant concentric shells, at least according to the redshifts. One of the less heated discussions I've seen of the consequences is at the University of Alabama's Astronomy department. Bill Keel, the astronomer here commenting, finishes "The evidence in favor of the standard picture is hardly compelling [...]. It survives mostly because nothing better has shown up;". Bill is the bloke who (which Ray White) brought us the silhouetted galaxy shot from Hubble, and has a huge collection of astronomically interesting stuff on his site.
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IIRC, transwarp doesn't actually make your trip any faster with respect to how the traveler perceives it. Instead it somehow dilates (or contracts, I forget which) time so that on the outside it seems like you took a lot less time than you did inside the ship.
So you think you were traveling for 2 weeks, but everyone else thinks your trip took 1 week. Something like that.
I always thought that explanation was lame, personally, and it did come from "Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise," which really is tremendously inconsistent with the rest of the ST Universe. So who knows.
+++ATH0
...from RGB photos instead of spectral lines on a plate.
Like I said, many scientists object to it from their armchairs (and others too, QED) more because they're uncomfortable with where it might take them than by experimenting themselves or because they've found positive contradictions. Vague handwaving appeals to authority like the HubbleSite wording are almost a hallmark of this approach.
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There are plenty of spectra elsewhere - and perhaps more usefully, plenty of tabulations and analyses of said spectra.
Also, there is nothing to stop Markarian 205's quasar from being behind the "host" galaxy relative to us, since we are working in 3D here. The unsolved question is how far behind it is. It doesn't make much weight in the argument either way, but if you could show that every case was such an overlay and that there were few cases of near-UV absorption for visually isolated quasars you'd have a case.
Another potential explanation for low near-UV, one pulled out of the ether as I type rather than dreamed up by a competent astrophysicist might be that quasars throw off UV in bands shaped roughly like Jupiter's clouds, and Markarian 205 happens to not have a band aimed at us.
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Yes, and what does it look like from the side? You've got to admit than an exactly-planar strike is extremely unlikely - unless Arp's theories on the issue are in essence correct (obviously not a palatable outcome for you).
Why? A few thousand or tens of thousands of light-years may not make much difference either way. Yet you seem to be assuming that any difference at all is going to be vast. Having Markarian half-buried in the galaxy would be fine from Arp's PoV.
Big surprise there. Consider carefully the term "ad hoc".
You've still only raised one possible explanation for why that should be so, but what if (to materialise another ad hoc proposal) Markarian's hyperindigo is being spread more by NGC 4319, the closer it passes by? That would be observed as lower intensity too. And who knows what material flows near large gravity-linked objects would be like? I'm sure there's other possibilities.
I didn't claim that you provided links to either side. I provided a link to a site discussing the state of affairs in a reasonably even-handed manner, and said so.
But no, that wasn't good enough for barakn! Having decided that I'm a member of set "wacky little group", you've got it fixed in your mind that I must, by definition, have done something wrong, haven't you? Or are you going to be "completely dishonest" about that? Nothing like a good dose of ad hom to screw up a debate you feel insecure about, is there? (-:
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Camp 1: Support the work of William Tifft in '70s, and subsequent work of Napier and Guthrie in '97 showing quantized redshifts, used as proof of geocentric or galactocentric universe, with concentric shells of galaxies around us or our galaxy. Tifft's early work utilized results of pencil-beam surveys, largely discredited because a foamy universe produces the same results. Napier and Guthrie find quantization in larger sample of galaxies in the Virgo cluster, statistically significant only when assuming the local cluster is falling towards Virgo. Many members of this camp are Christians who think that Earth is special because of Divine Interest in the human race.
Camp 2: Arp and friends. They think that redshift has two components, one associated with velocity and one an intrinsic (inherent) property of the object that increases with time. While they deny the geocentric shell model and the quantization of "total" redshift, they do think the intrinsic redshifts are quantized. Start with galaxies in the middle of a pair of quasars. One must assume the quasars have the same intrinsic redshift (and that they had a common origin in the 'parent' galaxy), and then the intrinsic redshift of both can be found by an average of the total redshifts of the two quasars. Quantization of the intrinsic redshift is implied to mean that something about the quasars changes as they age- in discrete steps. This is where they decide to throw out much of modern physics on its ear. They conclude that quasars are new matter being born in an infinitely-old, flat universe (somehow being spit out of the hearts of more mature galaxies). New matter starts out with zero mass and gains mass as it ages, either as the square of the elapsed time or in discrete quantum steps, depending on which website one reads. ref.
Camp 3. 'Mainstream' scientists - Think that redshift is due to the peculiar velocity of the emitting object and the stretching of the space through which the photons must travel on their way here. Quasars are very far away, not near foreground galaxies. Problems: 90% of the expected matter is invisible. A 'dark energy' is necessary to explain the perceived expansion. ref
So I got confused when you started the thread by saying something that sounded like you were in camp 1, but then posting links to camp 2. Some mainstream astronomers think there may be something interesting lurking in reports of quantization., so don't knock us for asking about it. Even worse would be if we ignored it entirely.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
I'm happy here in the peanut gallery, noting that several cosmologists are grossy upset at the existing theories (I note the recent appearance of another new "white-hole cosmology", for example) and waiting to see how the dust will settle.
But meanwhile, please accept a "+1, Reasonable" moderation for your response. (-:
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