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Record-Breaking Galaxy Cluster Found
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers are reporting that they have detected the most distant cluster of galaxies ever seen: a mind-smashing 9.6 billion light years away, 400 million light years more distant than the previous record holder. The cluster, handily named SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510, was seen in infrared images by the giant Subaru telescope, and confirmed with spectroscopy and the X-ray detection of million-degree gas (a smoking gun of clusters). Every time astronomers push back the record for clusters, they learn more about the early conditions of the universe, so this cluster will provide insight into how the universe itself changed over the first few billion years after the Big Bang."
Is this the new "Beowulf cluster?"
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
Now we know which galaxy Destiny is headed towards, although I can't wait to see Robert Carlyle trying to pronounce that mouthful when they arrive.
"Do they have oil?"
Indeed, this is great to get away from all the navel gazing on Earth. I live in the desert and this kind of expansive discoveryis inspiring
Waiting for the other shoe to...
How many parsecs is that? Er, wait ... [head asplode]
i tried to consider what 9.6 billion light years was like in terms of distance. i mean, really, really tried to get a mental grasp on that scale of size
and i couldn't do it, and now there's a trickle of blood leading out of my nose
thanks a lot, slashdot
i'll just go back to the simply mind-bending effort of trying to imagine the amount of indexed pages in google in terms of library of congress units
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
a mind-smashing 9.6 billion light years away, 400 million light years more distant than the previous record holder.
Or not.
It is the deepest image of the universe ever taken by humans, looking back approximately 13 billion years (between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang), and it will be used to search for galaxies that existed at that time.
Could part of this cluster be Earth? 9.6 billion years ago the universe was smaller. Does anyone know of an estimate for the distance/time needed to spiral back to looking at ourselves? If the big bang happened a little over 13 billion years ago ... this has got to be getting close.
How far apart do your measuring points need to be to accurately triangulate the position of something 9.6 billion light years away?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Do these clusters sometimes merge together to give birth to entirely new galaxies, and if so, what would that merging process be called?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Pushing galaxy formation earlier isn't merely a case of getting a more obscene number. It's giving the models we use to analyze galaxies a serious work-out. Same with spotting ever-earlier stars. In the case of stars, we're pushing the limits of what existing models permit for star formation. If we go much further back there, then the models have an error. Which is good. Science gets booooring when the models are correct and everything matches predictions. Adventure, Excitement and Really Wild Things are only possible when the old models fail and have to either be re-tuned or replaced.
(This is why the failure to detect Dark Matter was so important. Dark Matter is absolutely mandatory for certain models to predict correctly how the universe works. Failure in science is not a bad thing, it is an extraordinarily GOOD thing, as it requires people to revisit past assumptions and past data, to see why the discrepancy exists. It also requires scientists to develop new ideas of what to look for. Some things, we don't know what scale we should be looking at. The Higg's Boson is an example. We've a good idea the LHC will see evidence of it, provided all the numbers are right, but we can't be sure. Gravity waves are tougher - we really should be seeing those by now but aren't. However, all modern gravity wave detectors are merely oversized Michelson-Morley experiments, which Einstein demonstrated could never observe the theorized medium of the ether, no matter how accurate they were. It is therefore possible that gravity waves aren't detectable because the experiments are the wrong ones. It is also possible that they aren't detectable because they aren't there. What isn't possible is for both theory and experiment to be correct.
The ideal in science is to find things that break the current model, but not by too much. Just enough to do interesting work, but not enough that they have to dodge apples falling upwards.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oooh, the MPAA/RIAA isn't gonna like that.
Not. one. damn. bit.
A bunch of galaxies in an image != galaxy cluster.
But hey, links to the Hubble UDF are always enjoyed. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
The aliens that inhabit SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510 recently discovered the Milky Way, and decided to call it SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510. This is going to get confusing.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
As science geekettes go, Dr. Hannelore Hämmerle is teh hawt!!!
You, sir, are an idiot*.
*unless you know of a way for matter, or indeed light, to travel faster than light.
which is totally what she said
the first sentence. Felt like a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Well problem 1 with that is the fact that the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, and thus looking at a galaxy that is 9.6 billion years ago we can't see anything that would have formed in the last 4.5 bilion years.
Problem 2 is that you are proposing that the universe (in this case space) is finite, but has no boundries... and wraps around on itself. While you are not the first to propose this theory, to the best of my knowledge we currently have no evidence that this may be the case, nor any mathmatical model on why it should be the case.
feh
Employee Of the Month - Cyberdyne Systems Corporation - September 1997
I wonder if it can be modded to drift..
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
If we're looking at the light source from something that was emitted 9 billion light years ago, how do we know the universe is still expanding? Isn't it possible the universe quit expanding and has been shrinking for the last few billion years? Would we even know about it if it was shrinking at the speed of light? What abou... [no carrier]
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A mind-smashing 9.6 billion light years away
Our sun is, what, 5 billion years old? And our galaxy, like 10 billion years old?
It blows my mind that we're able to observe light that was around from when our solar system was but a twinkle in the pool of eternity.
The mathematical model is General Relativity, which postulates that gravity warps the universe back upon itself like the surface of a 4 dimensional sphere. So you could fly off into space and arrive at the same point 14 billion years later from the other direction, or a bit later if you weren't traveling at light speed ;-)
Personally I think it's a bit silly, but that puts me way out of line with mainstream cosmology.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Some people have trouble coming up with a mental conception of a distance as large as 9.6 billion light-years. I have a simple trick I use.
Imagine a (chocolate) birthday cake that is 12 inches tall.
Stack 5,280 of those on top of each other.
Then, take the mega-cake and slice it 5.87849981 × 10^12 times. Stack each slice on top of the previous one.
Then, reslice the stacked slice another 9.6 billion times, adding each subsequent micro-slice to the stack.
And there you have it.
clusterfuck???
Can you point me to some papers on this? To my knowledge general realativity breaks down on what the "edge of the galaxy" looks like, and you needed quantum mechanics and "imaginary time" to start begining to explain it.
Either that or Stephen Hawking's explanation of this topic was above my head, which is possible.
Just be glad they didn't use the Toyota telescope otherwise it would still be going...
If I did my maths right (and that's always doubtful), it's 3.14(+/-) million years away at warp 9.9.
You might want to pack some extra snacks for that trip.
- Pithy comment goes here.
That's not necessary. All that is necessary is for there to be a giant mirror 9.6/2 = 4.8 billion light years away, which would make it appear as if there were a cluster 9.6 billion light years away when in fact that cluster is... us! :)
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
The universe is only 10,000 years old.
and try to visualize the sound of one hand clapping. Or with the clap. Or something like that.
Best Slashdot Co
So we can only travel to the future (according to Stephen Hawking), but we can see in to the past. I think my head is going to explode.
It is basically the light from our own galaxy, Milky Way, when it was formed. The light went out on a curved path bent by our own gravity and it has finally turned around and returned to us. Stop eating that burger. We dont want to get any heavier.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
One thing I do not quite understand is that given the fact that we are in the universe, and we can see 9.6 billion lightyears in one direction, yet we can also see several billion lightyears in the other direction.
This seems to me a direct contradiction with either the big bang theory or relativity. You see those objects are more than 13.7 billion lightyears apart (and let's not forget that that cluster was 9.6 billion lightyears away 9.6 billion years ago). WTF ? Seems to me that today, the universe must be somewhere near 30 billion lightyears in diameter to give us the images we're seeing.
So ... how did they get so far apart ? Is the big bang theory wrong ? Or are these galaxies simply flying faster than light (relative to one another) ? Or is the universe in fact a lot bigger/older/... than we think ?
Aren't there some theories that space is curved such that the light from our little corner of the universe from 4.5 billion years ago very well could loop back around and we could see ourselves?
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Well problem 1 with that is the fact that the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, and thus looking at a galaxy that is 9.6 billion years ago we can't see anything that would have formed in the last 4.5 bilion years.
That's not right. It's not even wrong. - W. Pauli
We can't see anything that's happened in that galactic cluster in the last 9.6 billion years. Because the light from it that we're seeing now was emitted 9.6 billion years ago.
The age of the Earth, or the continents, or America, or New Jersey, or you, doesn't enter into it.
However, consider what the galactic cluster would have seen if it looked at us at the time that light was emitted. It would see pillars of dust, and the ignition of proto-stars. 5.1 billion years later the Earth would "form", and 9.6 billion years after that the formation of the Earth would reach the galactic cluster. That will be 5.1 billion years from now.
We know it's there, but it can't know Earth is here.
Actually, physicists are not saying that "things" were going faster than light. They're saying that space itself was expanding faster than than light. Which is not the same thing at all.
Also: the article at the link you provide shoots down the idea that the speed of light changes with time, in rather strong terms. I'm not an expert in the field of cosmology, but I don't believe anyone takes seriously the idea of a varying speed of light. You might want to read over your own link.
According to Hawking there was no big bang and the universe continually cycles through itself, like a circular wave travelling from one pole on the Earth to the other, superposing on itself to a peak there, then continuing on through itself to travel to the other pole, peaking again, then continuing on and on and on.
Of course what I've done there is used the 2-D surface on the 3-D globe to stand in for the slightly more complicated situation of a 4-D spacetime with, as Hawking suggested, additional imaginary components.
There are various theories, but one is CTC's, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve
It may raise the question, but it doesn't beg the question.
Modern usage of the term differs from historical "proper" usage. Language evolves. Deal with it. The fact that pedants have to continually re-state this is a good indicator that modern usage is more intuitive.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Look at it this way:
The universe is philosophically incoherent. You are just a meatbag on an insignificant planet orbiting an insignificant sun in an insignificant galaxy, perhaps in another insignificant universe.
There are an infinite number of infinitely more intelligent beings out there, living on infinitely more life bearing planets, and an infinite number of those beings are capable of having the same damned idea that you just did. At any point in time, it's likely that at least a few of them have had the same infinitely improbable thought that you just did; and some infinitesimal fraction of those may have had noses, and some infinitesimal fraction of those beings may have had noses that bled, and some fraction of those had bleeding noses because they were trying to contemplate infinity.
It's a good bet, however, that a large fraction of them just don't give a shit.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. I'll rephrase.
AC was asking if it'd be possible to be looking at a galaxy that turned out to be the milky way in the past, and thus it might be possible for us to be looking at earth in it's past form.
Granting for the sake of argument that the theory that the universe wraps-around on itself is true (which I don't personally believe it is), even if the galaxy we're looking at WAS the milky way, it'd be impossible to be looking at earth as earth wouldn't be forming in that galaxy for another 4.1 billion years or so.
When it was going through inflation, it hadn't collapsed into the set of physics why now have.
IN fact, it may have gone through sever types before collapsing into what we know observe.
". And Scientists are like most people, they don't like big changes."
That is completely false. They LOVE big changes. Nobel prizes, cash grants, a chair, books are easier to achieve by discovering big changes.
Big changes make your career, especially if it changes away from something the data had previously pointed from.
however you need to be able to show substantial evidence you can just toss out a different idea. You need to back it with data that others can confirm.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wait for the next edition of Alexander Franklin's book as he tries to topple the big bang theory, "dark matter" (faerie dust) and "Dark energy". http://www.jaypritzker.org/index.html
There's a bunch of papers on this, including from throughout Einstein's career. He changed his mind several times on this. The basic idea is since relativity explains gravity as not exerting a force but warping space, every chunk of matter put a bend in the universe, which all bends the same way (closer) and eventually bends back on itself. Like if one kept putting kinks in a wire, eventually it would form a loop.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -