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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."
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
I raise to differ!
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)
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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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.