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."

Comments

Re:Huh?

[Aardpig]

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.