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Record-Breaking Galaxy Found In Deep Hubble Image
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers using Hubble Space Telescope have found a galaxy at the very edge of the Universe: the light from this far-flung object has been traveling a whopping 13.1 billion years to get here! The galaxy appears as a non-descript dot in the infrared Hubble Ultra Deep Field taken using the Wide Field Camera 3, but a spectrum taken using a ground-based telescope confirms that we're seeing this object as it was a mere 600 million years after the Big Bang itself."
So does it still exist? Considering how far the light is traveling to get here, is there any way to determine if the galaxy is even still there? Then again I don't imagine they just disappear but I dunno it could be suffering heat death and all the stars burning out.
Considering that they state that this galaxy is 13.1 billion light years away, and 600 million years after the Big Bang... I would say that from a rough calculation that the limit you're referring to is about 13.7 billion light years.
Yes, there's a limit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Big_Bang#Recombination:_ca_377.2C000_years
When the universe was still too hot for atoms to form, photons couldn't get too far before hitting a free electron. Then the universe cooled enough for recombination of hydrogen ions and electrons, making the universe 'clear'.
So we can only see back to 377000 years after the big bang, then it's lost in the background microwave radiation.
I am not sure it is a record-breaking galaxy, but Hubble is definitely a record-breaking telescope!
the universe was opaque to radiation until 400,000 years after the Big Bang, that's the very last time most of the CMB photons interacted with matter.
Actually, I believe that after the Big Bang but before the first galaxies, there was a rather long period which were know as the dark ages".
You can see radiation from the big bang, but you can't see the light. Ever. The big bang itself didn't make any light. Photons simply couldn't exist in those conditions.
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Don't forget that all we're talking about here is photons created in mid-transit so that it would look like there's a galaxy there. Personally, I still think dinosaurs take the cake in the category of artifacts created 6000 years ago solely for our bemusement.
So they're trying to tell me that within 600 million years of the big bang, that galaxy managed to get 13 billion light years away from where our galaxy now lies? Even if we and it are at opposite ends of the universe, it would have to have gotten 6.5 billion light years from the center of the universe in those 600 million years, yes? It sounds like it must have been going a bit over the speed limit, don't you think? It got that far away, and still had time to form into a galaxy? Why is my slide rule melting as I try to figure out how it got so far away so quickly? Maybe the light took 13 billion years to reach us, but it's been going around in circles? If so, that Galaxy might be a LOT closer, as the crow flies.
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
I think it's because we are not looking at an object located at a specific time / distance,but we are searching all objects for the few that happen to be detected are at a similar vector from the point of origin as ours. So we are detecting things that originated at our location or a similar one a long time ago even if we were not there. Mentioned in the article is the fact that since we are able to detect this object which originated from that selected interval there must be a myriad of similar objects that actually behave in the way you describe.
In a way it is. Everything is. The cosmic background radiation simply has so much redshift it's shifted to microwave (redshift of over 1000). WMAP has made a picture.
Note that this glow isn't from the Big Bang itself. The universe was so hot (over a billion K) it wasn't transparent yet. There were no protons and neutrons, only a superheated quark soup. The signal WMAP captured was from about 400.000.000 years later: when the universe expanded and cooled enough to get transparent.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
The Earth is 6500 years old, or approximately 12000 metric years. The heavens were created at the same time, so we can only assume that the universe itself is 6500 years old, as well.
So if this galaxy was created 600 million years after the creation of the universe, then it exists 599,993,500 years in the future. Adjust for inflation and it's approximately 13.1 billion years in the future. We could be seeing our future selves.
But Armageddon is going to happen in 2012, right? Is God playing tricks on us again?
That reminds me of a joke...
Knock. Knock.
Who's there?
Armageddon.
Armageddon who?
Armageddon tired of waiting for you to open the door!
Omnes tuae crepidines sunt nobis sunt. Ascendo tuum!
So can a galaxy be created in 600 million years?
And why isn't this galaxy backlit by the overwhelming brightness of the Big Bang itself? It would seem if you looked just a little bit further back in time everything ought to be one gigantnormous flash bulb.
The galaxy is backlit, the "flash" is merely at microwave frequencies not visible light frequencies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_background_radiation.
... how can a vacuum, with no physical or chemical properties, go 'bang?'
There was no vacuum yet. There was a "point" of stuff/energy we can't really describe very well that expanded *very* quickly. Referring to this expansion as an "explosion" or "bang" is just a convenient analogy.
FWIW, the phrase "big bang" was coined by opponents of the theory. It was an attempt to mock the theory.
I am surprised to see so many comments without even one mentioning the difference between the AGE of the Universe (13.7 billion l.y. ) and the SIZE of the observable universe (radius 47 billion l.y.).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
From the Wiki Article:
The age of the Universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years. While it is commonly understood that nothing travels faster than light, it is a common misconception that the radius of the observable universe must therefore amount to only 13.7 billion light-years. This reasoning makes sense only if the Universe is the flat spacetime of special relativity; in the real Universe, spacetime is highly curved on cosmological scales, which means that 3-space (which is roughly flat) is expanding, as evidenced by Hubble's law. Distances obtained as the speed of light multiplied by a cosmological time interval have no direct physical significance.[11]
So, the light from this Galaxy actually traveled more than 13.7 billion years (I don't know how to make the conversion but probably around 45 billion ?)
XARG.
You might be tickled to learn that there are some (wild-ish) theories that posit "every mathematical abstraction exists", as in, for every concept you can derive from mathematics, it actually exists "somewhere". Look at "mathematical multiverse" here http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html And Tegmark is not actually a crackpot, just fanciful. :)
Paraphrasing ontologist Bill Clinton: "It depends on your definition of 'exists'". For epistemological questions I refer you to Donald Rumsfeld.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Yes. The fluctuations in density seen in the cosmic microwave background are large enough that some can collapse under gravity to galaxy massed globs within a few hundred million years. What has been more of a mystery is how stars can form since gas needs to cool to condense enough to form stars and big bang gas is very clean and has a hard time cooling radiatively. One might think that only very massive stars might form but then this would never dirty up the gas since they would soon collapse to back holes and never release processed material back to their surroundings. However, pair instability supernovae disrupt their cores when they explode and likely seed protogalaxies particularly with oxygen which, when combined with abundant hydrogen, can form ice and allow normal cooling of gas for star formation. One bit of evidence that ice is important comes from the infrared emission of an early quasar: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008ApJ...686..251D
Actually, what you mean is the edge of the observable universe. If any of the inflationary models are correct there may be way, way more universe out there beyond this little blob of light, they're just cut off from observation here because the light from them hasn't had time to reach us since the inflationary phase ended. If, as is probably the case, we're in another phase of accelerating inflation, we'll never see beyond this horizon because the space between here and there is expanding faster than the speed of the light, so it'll never get here.
the light from this far-flung object has been traveling a whopping 13.1 billion years to get here!
What really boggles my mind is that we can detect it at all. Considering the enormous travel time, and thus the enormous distance, and that radiant power is what, quartered every time you double the distance, I'm just amazed we get any photons at all from there. At that distance, the shell of photons it emitted 13 billion years ago have got to be pretty spread out, and we'd almost be able to count them coming in, one every few minutes at best?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
At warp 9 (STNG scale) it would take round about 8.64 million years to get there.
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So, I can create a galaxy in less than 600 million years. If I do this, then nobody better complain when I become its Galatic Overloard!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.