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Powerful Galaxies Found in Infrared
demachina writes "NASA's Spitzer Infrared space telescope has discovered 'a mysterious population of distant and enormously powerful galaxies radiating in the infrared spectrum with many hundreds of times more power than our Milky Way galaxy.' They are 80% of the way back to the big bang. They found them by comparing a visible and infrared scan of the sky and looking at the places where there was a big infrared signature and no visible one. They are shrouded in dust."
and if they're smart, they're hiding from us. fp?
When you say "enourmously powerful" what exactly are we talking here? like, weapons? big spaceships? that sort of thing?
in the constellation Bootes the Herdsman, the IRS team selected and observed 31 that are quite bright in the infrared but invisible in the NOAO survey.
:(
So you really can't hide from the IRS
... or is it hilarious to see the pop-up ads that are linked to words like "radio", "satellite" and "software"? Their content is so commercial, and so divorced from relation to the scientific news of the article, that instead of being ads, they become parodies of themselves.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
I just woke up and w/o my glasses mis-read "Powerful Galaxies Found in Ireland"
My first thought was Slashdot editors are getting worse by the minute, turns out im just blind as a bat.
This begs one to ask, if we keep finding these galaxies that are emitting energy but no light, is this dark matter or is it just normal matter that we just haven't been able to find yet? There might be a hell of a lot more dust out there than we thought there was originally.
The Immortality Institute
If all the stars and celestial bodies (galaxies, ect.) are all different distances from us, and are all moving in relation to each other...
How do we know where they really are? If any EM radiation takes time to get here... Our night sky view is a view of something that has never happened, is not happening now, and will not happen (at least the particular configuration we see). The same thing goes for our radio telescopes, thermal, x-ray, ect.
That galaxy they found could not even exist now, or it may actually be 180 degrees relative to where we see it now.
Am i just crazy? Or do we have NO hope of actually figuring out where things are unless we figure out how to use quantum mechanics somehow to do it?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
If these are really powerful galaxies then they will think the milky way is a girly sounding name and beat it up. I propose 'the hard as coffin nails' galaxy be adopted.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Took all that time to write in 1337. You could have had it if you had just taken the time to write normally. Shame.
Spitzer Space Telescope Finds Bright Infrared Galaxies
by Larry Klaes
Ithaca NY (SPX) Mar 02, 2005
A Cornell University-led team operating the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS), the largest of the three main instruments on NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, has discovered a mysterious population of distant and enormously powerful galaxies radiating in the infrared spectrum with many hundreds of times more power than our Milky Way galaxy.
Their distance from Earth is about 11 billion light years, or 80 percent of the way back to the Big Bang.
Virtually everything about this new class of objects is educated speculation, the researchers say, since the galaxies are invisible to ground-based optical telescopes with the deepest reach into the universe.
"We think we have an idea of what they are, but we are not necessarily correct," says Cornell senior research associate in astronomy Dan Weedman.
Among the more probable ideas are that these mysterious bodies are ultraluminous infrared galaxies, powered either by an active galactic nuclei (AGN) or by a starburst, a massive burst of star formation.
AGNs are powered by the in-fall of matter to a massive black hole, while massive starbursts often are triggered by the collision of two or more galaxies.
What makes the objects studied by the Spitzer team stand out is that previously known AGNs are "not nearly as powerful, far away, or as dust-enshrouded" as these bodies are, says Weedman.
The Cornell Spitzer team's discovery is published in the March 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters (ApJL), published by the American Astronomical Society. The Spitzer telescope, which went into an Earth-trailing orbit around the sun in August 2003, is the last of NASA's Great Observatories, the Hubble being the first.
The IRS team used data obtained by the National Science Foundation's telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory, for the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) Deep Wide-Field Survey.
The team also used a catalog of infrared sources obtained in a survey in early 2004 by another of the Spitzer telescope's instruments, the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS).
From the thousands of MIPS sources in a three-degree square patch of the sky -- about one-fourth the size of the bowl of the Big Dipper - in the constellation Bootes the Herdsman, the IRS team selected and observed 31 that are quite bright in the infrared but invisible in the NOAO survey.
"The NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey is the best available optical survey for comparing to our data," Weedman says. "It would have been much more difficult to make this discovery without such a wide area of comparison. These NOAO data allowed us to compare the sky at infrared and optical wavelengths and find things that had never been seen before."
The Bootes area was chosen by the NOAO team because of the absence of obscuring dust in our galaxy, presenting a clear view of the distant sky. The presence of these mysterious, infrared, bright, but optically invisible, objects was first hinted at in 1983 in a paper by James Houck, Cornell's Kenneth A. Wallace Professor of Astronomy and principal investigator for the IRS.
Houck was interpreting data from another space probe he was involved with, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), the first astronomy mission devoted to searching the heavens for infrared sources. More than a decade later these strange objects were again recorded by the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory.
"Spitzer is more than 100 times more sensitive than IRAS for detecting objects at infrared wavelengths," says Houck.
"These celestial bodies are so far from our Milky Way galaxy that we detect them as they were when the universe was just 20 percent of its current age," says Sarah Higdon, a research associate in Cornell's Department of Astronomy, who led the group that developed the software package for analyzing Spitzer data.
In addition to their incredible d
So wait a minute - it says it's found these galaxies in the infared spectrum...
So what exactly constitutes a galaxy now? I thought a galaxy had to be a collection of stars; which omit visible light?
Try not to let life get in the way of living.
Like a link that subverts Firefox pop-up-blocking powerful? Or just plain old enormously powerful?
Maybe we're just in a particularly lucky section of the Big Bang spew. Or maybe we can't observe light that far away because of gravitational effects on photons. Kind of makes you wonder if it's by design.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
.. welcome our new huge galatic power overlords From The Beginning, and remind them that as a cretinous fleck of a lifeform in a completely insignificant part of the known universe, us humans are good for nothing.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
OK, I will be the first to admit I am ignorant on the topic. But how can we see infrared light if we can't see any visible light? Isn't light, well, light?
...I, on the other hand, have a cleaning fetish.
Or do they just get dustier with old age, which skews the emissions we receive towards the infrared.
You don't know the meaning of power till you've met my wife.
Yes, this is a troll.I've noticed something about sites that people say have popups. I go to these sites, and twice now, I see something similar to this. Notice I made the box on the top left. That's the FlashBlock symbol, which blocks all flash elements on web pages and replaces them with that symbol until you click on them. If I click on the symbol, I get the popup. Therefore, I say a possible way to stop these new popups, for now, is to use FlashBlock. It allows you to have flash installed while avoided flash ads, since most of the websites you visit don't use flash except for ads, and the ones that do have flash content you want you just click on the icon.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
"enormously powerful galaxies radiating in the infrared spectrum with many hundreds of times more power than our Milky Way galaxy" Sound like hell.
Look at how long it took for intelligent life to arise on this planet, on this solar system, in this galaxy. Who's to say that it necessarily took any less time elsewhere in the universe?
When we look to the skies we are looking back in time. So even if another civilization 300 hundred light years away developed radio 200 years ago, we won't hear from them for another 100 years. And 300 light years is barely measurable as distance in the grand scheme of things.
Plus by all indications inter-stellar space travel is extremely, extremely difficult. Either you're travelling at sub-light in a biosphere for hundreds of years, or you're using astronomical (actually super-astronomical) levels of energy to bend space-time far enough to reduce the travel time enough to obviate the need for the biosphere.
Either way we're talking about fantasy-levels of knowledge, control, or power. Look at how well biosphere experiments have worked so far. IMO, based on the state of the art in ecological and climate science, we are much farther from implementing a self-contained biosphere than we are from implementing the physical systems to support and transport it. And we can barely manage to keep our lights on--we're even farther from bending space-time enough to create a shortcut.
And in the absence of other evidence, I must use our development as the yardstick for measurement. Anything else would be fantasy rather than science.
Are we finally reaching the point when we're looking to objects and galaxies so incredibly far away, we're seeing things that only existed in the much younger universe? Surely with something so far away, the light would take ages to reach here.
The link in this post just gave me a popunder in Safari with pop-up window blocking on.
Couldn't find a link to the published ApJL paper, but this might be the preprint or related to it.
red is more powerful. Red Lightsaber, red cobra lasers, the eye of thundera (sp?), Dark Phoenix, Red Hat (vs windows blue). Ketchup tastes better than mustard. sheesh, of course there will be powerful galaxies inferred from red.
O.K. We'll take their word for it..give 'em the money..
Purple is the most powerful, but no one uses it because they don't want to be accused of being gay.
a dyson sphere is said to only radiate infrared. wiki
Popups??? What popups????
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
1. Galaxies are mammals.
2. Galaxies fight ALL the time.
3. The purpose of the Galaxy is to flip out and kill people.
Check out this site all about galaxies, REAL GALAXIES. This site is awesome.I can't stop thinking about Galaxies. These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
This is a great example of why ground based telescopes cannot be a substitute for space based ones.
Write your congressman! Save Hubble!
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Shouldn't the title of this post be "Ancient Galaxies found with infrared sensors", or something? "Powerful Galaxies found in infrared" sounds like we should be welcoming our Infrared Alien Overlords.
An interesting idea. Since these galaxies lie approximately 80% distance across the universe, and space is constantly stretching between us and them, the frequencies of light they emit must be higher than what we are observing. IANAC (I Am Not A Cosmologist), but could they be strongly emitting in the visible or UV regions, and spacetime is stretching them to the infrared?
"Me fail English, that's unpossible." --Ralphie
Or, you could just offer to buy a whole lot of what the, and say you want to invest in their company. Offer to take them to lunch to discuss the deal, and when they show up, beat them to death with a fucking claw hammer.
It's the right thing to do.
People used the word "light" (in different languages) long before we knew of radiowaves and other kinds of "light".
The scientists should use EM radiation and accept that light is "visible light" only.
I hereby redefine the word astronomer to mean every person who can see, since everyone has looked at stars at some time or another. An astronomer just looks at them in a special way.
demachina writes "NASA's Spitzer Infrared space telescope has discovered 'a mysterious population
.. i almost pissed myself...
I disagree, you could not really know where something "is" at a given time because there is no such thing as simultaneity in Einstein's relativity. Simultaneity is just a false perception we have because the speed of light is much higher than the speeds we witness in everyday life. For further information on the subject I suggest considering light-cone diagrams.
and yes... IANAL but IAAP (I Am A Phycisist)
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
radiating in the infrared spectrum with many hundreds of times more power than our Milky Way galaxy
It's God's remote control.
Chip H.
...these were dust bunnies of mine from grade 3. I am so glad they went on to bigger and enormously better things.
A few points here:
- The big bang is a theory, NOT fact.
- Even if we assumed that the Big Bang theory is true, we don't know how big the universe is, so there would be no way to calculate a point of 'bang.'
I'm not here to bash the big bang (although I am proud of that work of alliteration), only to point out that it is unsound to accept a theory blindly and to throw out numbers like '80%' that cannout be proven.
I believe that it only reinforces the point that it's unrealistic to expect to get a phone from ET any time soon--even if we believe he exists.
Essentially you are raising the issue of the 'well, if the universe is BIG and life (particularly intelligent life) is not mind bogglingly rare ... then where the heck is all the radio traffic from extraterrestrial?' question.
... given what we've been sending out for the last 60 odd years we could be getting a visit any century now :)
This is sometimes otherwise known as the Fermi Paradox. (google the term, makes for interesting reading. See also: 'Drake Equation').
Who knows ? Not enough data to meaningfully populate the Drake equation is available to us as yet. One intruiging & fun possibility mentioned by the authors F.Saberhagen (in the Beserker books) and David Brin (in the highly recomended short story 'Lungfish') is the beserker hypothesis - a theory that posits that it is marginally possible that some agency hunts down and stomps on worlds generating non-artificial radio signals. Sort of like a 'snuff version of the Arthur C Clarke Sentinel/2001 stories.
Heh
A while before our present Open Source S/W
movement's growth, Ashton-Tate's powerful
one (many will recall their dBASE family)
saw Fox Software's FoxBASE public demo...
FoxBASE was faster [& may have had fewer
bugs, as well]. A-T would soon feel the
pinch, as users jumped ship to Fox S-W.
But first, a law suit arose, in which
Fox was claimed to have stolen A-T's IP.
From memory, it turned out that the
US gov't owned the IP, so A-T lost.
Fox continued to grow & improve, ie,
until acquired by M$. Soon after the
acquisition, Dr Dave left Fox S-W...
and FoxPro changed, not necessarily
for the better, I understand...?
PS: What's Dr Dave doing now? (And
what did he do after leaving M$ ?)
new moon
Since the universe is expanding, the further an object is away from the observer, the greater its red-shift. Hubble came up with the idea that the visible universe isn't limited by what's visible... It's limited by the velocity-distance proportionality. At some point everything that would be visible has been completely red-shifted out of the visible spectrum.
Yep. Take a look at a photo of the Andromeda galaxy. Does it have life in it? For all of our mapping and science, we have no clue whether it does or not. For all we know that galaxy is teeming with ships and commerce, long with Death Stars and evil emperors ... but we have no way of detecting this.
... and if other locales had similar phenomena happening right now, or recently, we wouldn't see it (assuming we could) for a long time due to the distance for light/etc to travel.
... yeah, do that"). What if alien life doesn't want to be found?
And consider that it's only been a few centuries between the Enlightenment (when knowledge from centuries past was rediscovered, and superstition was slowly replaced by fact and discovery) and now (when we're planning for interplanetary travel, and contemplating interstellar). Assuming comparable sentient beings, that's not a lot of time for quite a jump
Finally, for the conspiracy theorists out there, is it not possible that aliens here are actively thwarting our efforts to see them / find them, by influencing the direction we look for evidence ("no no, don't look to hard at that star, focus more energy on traveling to Mars