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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."
Don't forget that everything we percieve from space happened a LOOONG time ago. There may very well be life out there, but what we see is part of it's past.
They may even be transmitting, may have been for a looong time. By the time we recieve the transmission, they (or us) may become extinct.
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...
Well, If I throw a ball to you your hands will hopefully be in the right place to catch the ball before it arrives.
That's because Newtons laws of gravity and motion are more-or-less perfect for ball catching. Where greater times, distances and speeds are involved Einstein's theory of relativity becomes more useful.
Scientists hedge their bets on those laws and previous observations of stars and galaxies being good enough to estimate where this are now and where they were.
This could all be in my head and everything's just a dream, I'll hedge my bets it isn't.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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.
I think one way to break people's misconceptions about the different types of EM radiation (radio, microwave, infrared, visible, uv, xray, gamma) is to explain that the difference is not in the light itself, but in the scale of the things that the light interacts with.
The reason that they seem so different to us is because their wavelengths are larger/similar to/smaller than various atoms and molecules that we can observe them interacting with, so the net effect can be drastically different. If someone were able to magically scale matter to a larger or smaller size with correspondingly changed energy levels, the apparent properties of the different frequencies of light would change accordingly, even though maxwell's laws would remain unchanged.
I don't know about other life forms, but could these galaxies perhaps make up some of what we call "dark matter"?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
The big bang is a theory, NOT fact.
You seem to equate 'theory' with 'guess'. Actually, the word 'theory' in a scientific context indicates an extremely well-tested, valid model of the natural world --- essentially, as close as one can possibly get to the truth behind what is going on. Newton's gravitation is a theory. Einstein's relativity is a theory. Maxwell's electromagnetism is a theory. Darwin's evolution is a theory.
In the specific case of the big bang, there is very strong evidence pointing towards its occurrence --- things like the uniform recession of the galaxies, and the cosmic microwave background (basically, an afterglow from the event itself). This is hard, cold evidence --- nothing unsound about it.
we don't know how big the universe is, so there would be no way to calculate a point of 'bang.'
In fact, we do know how big the Universe is. And furthermore, since spacetime itself was created in the big bang, the event didn't happen at a single point, but everywhere.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.