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."

Comments

Fascinating!

[spartacus_prime]

Is this the new "Beowulf cluster?"

Re:Fascinating!

[DevConcepts]

Nope! Ping time to long @ 9.6 Billion light years.

Re:Fascinating!

[DevConcepts]

FTA (Shock I read it!) - Might want to RTFA before you try to bring a joke down with math.

But there’s more. Because clusters are so big and bright, they can be seen really far away. In space, distance means time; the farther away we see an object, the younger the Universe was when the light left that object. In the case of this newly found cluster, the light we see left it 9.6 billion years ago — making it 400 million light years farther away than the next-most distant cluster ever seen. The Universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old, so we’re seeing this structure as it was not too long after it formed.

Re:Fascinating!

[Amouth]

The Universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old

and yet we still are looking for the expiration date..

Re:Fascinating!

[Skarecrow77]

Current models suggest that the initial inflationary period of the univerise after the big bang was well in excess of the speed of light. WAY in excess actually.

Yes, this implies that there may be galaxies further away than we can see, outside of our horizon of cause or effect. Heady stuff.

Re:Fascinating!

[The Bad Astronomer]

Heh. Well, I was careful to state that *the light we see from the cluster left 9.6 billion years ago*. When you start talking about the age "now" and distance traveled and all that, things get sticky quickly. Relativity makes a mess of our sense of "now".

Re:Fascinating!

[Archangel Michael]

I know that current models show that the brief moments after the BB (relatively speaking), that they had the universe expanding at FTL speeds. But I never understood how on the one hand, Physicists says that nothing can go FTL, and then say the first bit of time after the BB, things were going FTL.

However, there is an interesting theory that suggests that the speed of light is not a constant at all, but has been slowly degrading over the years.

Which actually fits the BB model much better than those who claim C being a constant, except for in the moments after the BB.

The problem with that hypothesis is that it breaks all sorts of things we used to rely upon as being sure. And Scientists are like most people, they don't like big changes.

Re:Fascinating!

[JJJ_NL]

Space itself can expand at a rate faster than light, which does not violate the idea that information must have speeds = c.

Re:Fascinating!

[lgw]

We're pretty sure now that the universe isn't smaller in "diameter" than the age of the universe, thanks to detailed studies of the cosmic microwave background radiation - we would expect to see the same images both close and at a distance if light were "looping", and we're not seeing that.

There's not much to go on for the physics of the actual size of the universe; it's the size of the observable universe that gets discussed. We can see things over 45 billion light years away (by current theories of how to estimate large distances), so the observable universe is at least 90 billion light years "across".

Re: Fascinating!

[Black Parrot]

I find it pretty hard to believe that we are that close to reaching the 'edge' of the universe. What will these materialists do when we discover a galaxy that is further away in light years than the universe is old?

As other have hinted (but not spelled out), you are trying to think out an einsteinean universe in euclidean terms. Since space itself is expanding, the euclidean numbers aren't expected to add up "right".

Either they will have to adjust the value for the age of the universe (as they normally do) or they will have to accept that the current method for determining age is flawed (i.e., that the universe appears older than it actually is).

I don't know about materialists, but scientists will go wherever the evidence leads.

Sometimes kicking and screaming, as in the case of continental drift, but the evidence always wins in the end.

It is certain that we're still wrong about some things -- probably a lot of things. But you can't take too much comfort from that; the corrections always take us further from the neolithic conception of reality rather than revealing that it was correct after all.

Re:Fascinating!

[blair1q]

It implies they're made of the stuff that moved faster than the light did, and what's in our universe is the stuff that didn't.

Which implies that our universe is made of stuff that can be moved by entrainment with the passage of the stuff that moved faster than light.

More fundamentally, it implies that what we think of as "universe" is "that which is made of the stuff that moves at or slower than the speed of light".

Which at this point includes the dark matter, which is dark because it's made of stuff that doesn't interact with light at all, i.e., it's not made of subatomic particles that react to the electromagnetic force.

In other words, any "galaxy" outside our "universe" isn't just so far away we can't see it, it's likely made of stuff that doesn't radiate anything we can see (at any spectrum, from low-frequency radio to gamma rays and above; as these are all electromagnetic and thus photonic in basis).

Re:Fascinating!

[Grishnakh]

I know first-hand there are a LOT of religious scientists. I don't understand how, but it's true.

There's nothing that really conflicts between spirituality and science. Science is about things we can observe and test. Spirituality is for things beyond which science can be used to understand reality. The "metaphysical" is about things which our physics don't yet understand. Remember, it wasn't that long ago that people thought it was impossible for an invisible force to act upon a solid object. Now we have magnets that can push things around seemingly by magic. Not long ago, people thought it was impossible to communicate with other people in other lands. Now we have radio and satellite communications, that let us talk to other people through thin air. These things would seem like magic to someone from the year 1500. Who knows what other unknown forces exist which we don't fully understand?

Don't forget also, that spirituality and philosophy are somewhat related, and philosophy is something that will never be superseded by science, as it's an orthogonal study.

The problem, however, is when you turn spirituality into "religion", and make a big human-managed power structure out of it (which of course requires regular mandatory "donations" of 10% of your income), and throw in a lot of dogma about things that plainly conflict with scientific understanding gained through examination of physical evidence. The whole 6500-year-old Earth idea, which about 1/3 of Americans and probably more than 1/2 of Turkey's population believe in, is a good example of this.

A scientist who believes there may be a higher power of some kind isn't acting against his training as a scientist, only acknowledging that there may be things which science can't account for. But a "scientist" who believes the Earth is 6500 years old should be fired and sent to work as a janitor.

Re:Which begs the question:

[bunratty]

It may raise the question, but it doesn't beg the question.

it IS mind-smashing

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:it IS mind-smashing

[Hatta]

I mean it took billion years for that light to get here, but who knows what could have happend in the meantime.

Given a known mass, we can predict how long a star will burn. A star with a mass roughly that of the sun will burn for about 10 billion years. So any young suns in this cluster will have burned out by now. Anything less massive will burn more slowly, and anything more massive will burn much faster.

Re:Ob

[Kjella]

9.6 billion light years = 2.94330797 × 10^9 Parsecs

How is this distance measured?

[Locke2005]

How far apart do your measuring points need to be to accurately triangulate the position of something 9.6 billion light years away?

Re: How is this distance measured?

[Black Parrot]

How far apart do your measuring points need to be to accurately triangulate the position of something 9.6 billion light years away?

It's probably measured by its red shift. The red shift can be calibrated by standard candles such as Cephid variables. The nearest of those are calibrated by parallax, or "triangulation" as you call it.

Wikipedia has an article on the extragalactic distance scale, which may interest you.

Re:Which begs the question:

[tom17]

I raise to differ!

Clusters?

[Locke2005]

Do these clusters sometimes merge together to give birth to entirely new galaxies, and if so, what would that merging process be called?

Re:Clusters?

[oodaloop]

In a bizarre and ironic twist, they are called weekly meetings.

Re:Clusters?

[abbynormal brain]

Either people are avoiding the obvious or maybe it's not so obvious ...
It would be called a cluster f*ck.

Sorry - after "clusterbation" and "galaxy bang" ... I had to jump in to prevent any further tangents.

Intriguing.

[jd]

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.

Re:Intriguing.

[jd]

The claim was the Big Bang didn't fit empirical observation, not that it was illogical. This argument is different. Still easily rejected, but different.

Let us start with something from nothing. The Big Bang says nothing about starting from nothing. Indeed, it says nothing about T=0, let alone before. Whatever "before" means when time isn't present.

Now let us consider what the physicists actually say about the origin of energy (there was no matter prior to Universal Inflation, and indeed not for some time after).

What is stated is that there are a wide range of possibilities, including a foam multiverse, colliding membranes or even a freak quantum foam event. Regardless, you only need a high enough energy density. After that, Inflation and Hawking Radiation is sufficient to account for everything else.

This was mostly old news when I learned about cosmology. That was about 1980, when I was 11. May have been a year earlier. Your education must really suck.

Um yeah

[Chris Burke]

A bunch of galaxies in an image != galaxy cluster.

But hey, links to the Hubble UDF are always enjoyed. :)

Re:Um yeah

[Skarecrow77]

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.

That's a coincidence...

[orkysoft]

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.

Re:That's a coincidence...

[Skarecrow77]

luckily they called it SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510 in their own, alien, langugage, which means that when we first encounter them, we'll just pick something that sounds vaguely, but not really all that close, to what they're saying.

Like, say, Peking.

My mind was smashed as soon as I read

[oodaloop]

the first sentence. Felt like a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.

Re:Really Star-tling ... navel gazing on Earth

[Skarecrow77]

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.

Re:Hubble UDF

[Luyseyal]

AFAIK, the HUDF does not image any clusters. If it does, your PhD may be ready...

-l

Putting it in Star Trek terms...

[ElVee]

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.

The whole thing is a lie from the Devil anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

The universe is only 10,000 years old.

-1, Pedant [Re:Um yeah]

[Stavr0]

[...] you may think it's a a long way down the road to the drug store^W^Wchemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

... let me guess, it's called "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" in your parts, isn't it...

Re:Seems a bit too far, actually

[Black Gold Alchemist]

Actually, the current theory is a bit weird, but what happens is three things. Please keep in mind that we think that the universe is infinite but not eternal. The first thing is that what we see is a bubble 13.7 lightyears in radius inside this infinite universe, expanding by 1 lightyear per year. The second weird thing is that there was a short period of FTL expansion when the universe was starting, called inflation. The third weird thing is that several types of apparent FTL are in play. One is that if something is flying away from you at say 3/4 the speed of light, and something else is flying away from you in the other direction, you have see something that looks like FTL. It's not though, due to time dilation.

The understanding of how exactly special and general relativity act in apparent FTL will be left as an exercise reader, as the author does not understand those theories and thus cannot explain them to you.

Re:Seems a bit too far, actually

[SpeZek]

Imagine two fleas running away from each other on a balloon as you blow it up. They're running at a fixed speed, and you're increasing the distance between them. Over a distance, their motion relative to each other will far exceed their possible maximum speed, because the distance between them is expanding while they run. Replace the fleas with galaxies and the balloon with the universe, and it's simple enough to see how while a body can't have speed faster than light, it can still be moved faster than light relative to another body by virtue of the space between them expanding constantly.

Any galaxy with a redshift of around 1.4 is moving away from us faster than the speed of light (the redshift is caused itself by the expansion of space between the time the light was emitted to when it hits us) since the velocity that any galaxy is moving away from the earth is proportional to its distance from us.

Re:Ob

[CrimsonAvenger]

I've always been fascinated by the notion that the parsec is somehow a more universal measurement than the light-year.

Both are based on Earth's orbit, after all.

The light year uses the period.

The parsec uses the diameter, coupled with the purely arbitrary base 60 conventions of the ancient Babylonians .