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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?"
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It may raise the question, but it doesn't beg the question.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
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9.6 billion light years = 2.94330797 × 10^9 Parsecs
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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.
I raise to differ!
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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 .
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