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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
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
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. --
No, No, you saw what they meant to type, its just yet another speeling error
Gravity Sucks
Well, just like how some material could filter out "green" light and let anything else through, maybe infrared is within the notch that this lets it pass through. But yes, light is light. Actually, light is EM radiation, and so is infrared.
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...
Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation. Radio waves, infrared, etc. all fall under the catagory, it just depends on the wavelength of the energy. Visible light is about 360-820 nanometers in wavelength. Anything above that starts getting into infrared, radio, microwave, etc. Below that number is ultraviolet, x-ray, and gamma radiation. Even if we can't see it, we can develop instruments that can detect it.
The Immortality Institute
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
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.
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.
a dyson sphere is said to only radiate infrared. wiki
Popups??? What popups????
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
Please refer to my post a few ways down, hopefully it will be modded up more for others to see and fix this problem, though I don't know whether Safari has the equivalent of FlashBlock that firefox does.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
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.
Because these galaxies are surrounded by dust (likely from massive starbursts, which produce dust). Dust, because of it's scattering properties, preferentially lets long wavelength light pass through it (ie. infrared) but scatters shorter wavelength light (ie. visible light) into other directions. This is the same effect you see when looking at a sunset. The setting sun looks redder because there is dust (small, scattering particles of various sorts) letting more red light through to you than blue light. In these galaxies, it is more extreme.
The effect is called "dust reddening." I have some slides about it for the lastest entry (March 2) for my Astronomy 1050 class at my astronomy webpage if you want to see examples.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Wow!! I just woke up and put on MY glasses and thought that I had misread yet another pointless "I misread that headline as" post!
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
though I don't know whether Safari has the equivalent of FlashBlock that firefox does
Apparently there's PithHelmet for Safari, but I haven't tried it out yet. Going to now.
In particular, you'd want to look at the slide for "Dark Nebula" if you go looking for this.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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.
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.
No, but powerful Ford Galaxies were found in the 1960s.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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$. Soon after the
acquisition, Dr Dave left Fox S-W...
and FoxPro changed, not necessarily
for the better, I understand...?
PS: What's Dr Dave doing now? (And
what did he do after leaving M$ ?)
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.