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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."
Now we have to start worrying about those again.
and if they're smart, they're hiding from us. fp?
w0r5h1p m3 n1gg3rz
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
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.
pro6ect. Today, as transfer, Ne7scape Or make loud noises
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."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
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