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Astronomers Find an Old-Looking Galaxy In the Early Universe
schwit1 tips news that a team of astronomers has studied one of the most distant galaxies ever observed and found puzzling results. The light we're seeing from this galaxy comes from roughly 700 million years after the Big Bang, so on the cosmic scale, it's quite young. But the galaxy appears much older than astronomers expected. Their paper was published today in Nature.
At this age it would be expected to display a lack of heavier chemical elements — anything heavier than hydrogen and helium, defined in astronomy as metals. These are produced in the bellies of stars and scattered far and wide once the stars explode or otherwise perish. This process needs to be repeated for many stellar generations to produce a significant abundance of the heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. Surprisingly, the galaxy A1689-zD1 seemed to be emitting a lot of radiation in the far infrared, indicating that it had already produced many of its stars and significant quantities of metals, and revealed that it not only contained dust, but had a dust-to-gas ratio that was similar to that of much more mature galaxies.
at a Galaxy on the far side of where the Big Bang occurred?
Left over from the death of the previous Universe and those heavier elements came from absorbing & digesting the young, tender clusters of our nascent cosmos and will one day swallow us ALL!!!
EXCELSIOR!
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Surely, according to the current theories, the "big bang" would be similar to just a "big supernova" in which heavy elements and very heavy elements are created. If the "big bang" fractured inconsistently, it is likely that it is not unreasonable that suretly after the "big bang" there would be many dense stars that go super-nova. Why they dont immediately fall back into into "black holes", all things considering, is another wonder
So much to learn... too many "theories".
1. ISIS. 2. Global Warming. 3. House of Cards.
1. Have we made a new discovery that changes our fundemental understanding of the universe?
2. Did somebody leave the dust cover on again.
Choose the road more travelled. It makes a difference.
Too much gravity to explain galaxies? 85% of it is dark matter.
Too little gravity to explain stuff at larger scales and times than that? 70% is dark energy.
Leaving ~5% as visible matter. If we adjusted our fundamental assumptions by assuming 95% of the universe is everywhere and otherwise undetectable to account for our observations being only 5% predictive, how exact do you think the overarching science really is to begin with?
IMO we'll need new and better detection techniques to make any real progress- or, if we are stuck with the current level of observations for a couple hundred years, maybe it'll be discerned that way. We just have a lot better luck with the former than the latter.
"anything heavier than hydrogen and helium, defined in astronomy as metals."
The city employee that picks ip the recycling at this astonomers place is not going to be happy///
A thought that occurred to me recently was could the Universe, instead of being expanding from a single point of origin, be much like the repeating pattern of concentric rings we see at the atomic level, the solar system and galaxies?
So large that the speed of light problem masks it's true structure.
Just asking, I'm not read up on astrophysics/physics enough to see any obvious problems with this idea...
Well obviously the galaxy is a senior citizen driving the wrong way on the time line.
Yipppeeeeeee for the vintage galaxy!!!!!!!!
Perhaps the galaxy looks old because it IS old, billions of years old.
... would like to welcome our all seeing, all knowing, universal overlords who have had much more time to evolve (possibly in a different universe), than us poor pond scum.
and...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/02/19/172391249/universe-or-universe-it-all-depends-on-the-multiverse
Obviously an advanced life form has worm holed their entire galaxy to an earlier time.
If there is an old system out at "the beginning of time" that might suggest one of a few things to me.
1: The universe might be older than we originally thought... which would be interesting. Which might also lead to the conclusion that...
2: The universe might be bigger than the rays that can reach us from the "edge of the universe"
3: This might be some other object or field between us and the galaxy that gives a different chemical reading, suggesting there is metal where there isn't
4: Maybe an old galaxy somehow got launched to the edge of the universe
Just some thoughts
What do you think will happen when immensely more powerful space telescopes are launched?
They are going to find more and more distant stars.
There is no evidence that distant objects are younger objects, we see spiral armed galaxies (these require galactic collisions) at 13 B light years out and there are cosmic structures that take up a fair percent of the sky that could not have been formed quickly, maybe not even in 13 B years and certainly at vast distances not in 1 or 2 billion years.
The CMB does not match a perfect black body, the perfect black body chart is and the CMB chart use different scales. Notice this is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... is in frequency and this is in wavelength http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... --- those are opposite units of measurements.
The Big Bang was an idea from 1920s before the modern era of space telescopes. The Catholic Church jumped onto the Big Bang in the 1950s because it aligns with the idea of divine creation and to atone of the treatment of Galileo, etc.
The Big Bang is going to join geocentrism as one of those funny beliefs humans had in early days of science, although it might take 20 years or so.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Also matches the expected spectrum of a built-out galaxy.
This hipster galaxy had metals before it was cool.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Physicists tend to scoff at philosophers but long forgotten is physics used to be called natural philosophy. The link is still there but specialization has effectively created a professional split. Here is a philosophical stab at a physics conundrum.
A 13.5 billion years or so old universe is engrained in our way of thinking but there is a rationale against it. Numbers.
13.5 billion years may sound like a large number but relative to infinite its practically finger counting. It seems rather unlikely that we would arrive so close to the beginning of time of our universe. Why not 10^50 years into the universe? Or 10^10000000000000000000000000000000000000 years in? And so on.
There is an argument to be made there plausibly will be some big crunch later or perhaps universe will expand to the point even protons are light years way from each other. Nevertheless. 13.5x10^9 seems absurdly early to show up. Chance doesn't exclude the possibility but it does seem rather improbable.
So here's my admittedly pseudo-scientific guess. Scientists got the big band theory wrong in some fashion and the universe is actually much much older than currently claimed (possibly of infinite age)
That's the Presidential Galaxy. It ages faster than normal due to stress.
Table-ized A.I.
Or perhaps, like the lack of compliance with known physics of the purported monoblock, this is another indicator that the big bang theory is simply wrong.
Just perhaps.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
the experts are wrong, meaning they aren't really experts? Then again, we put a lot of faith in weather forecasts.....
Do you think that monkeys sit about thinking "Hey, the world is flat, I reckon!"? No. Most people 3000 years ago didn't think about the shape of the PLANET because it made no damn difference: did it contain something to eat and something to fuck and somewhere to hide from those trying to do either of those to you when you don't want it to happen? is all that they thought about.
On land, it's obviously not flat. That's why people took such pains to move about to find some space flat enough to build their homes and plant their crops.
Of those who had the time and inclination to think about it, there's no reason why it should be thought flat, nor that the earth be stationary. It seems that way? Well it seems that the world is spinning round you when you're on a merry-go-round. That doesn't make it "obvious" that is what's happening. How would it look if the earth was spinning? And note that one of the major objects in the sky of interest (because it changes shape) is the moon, and it's quite obvious that the moon is round. You can see more craters as it rotates slightly over time, indicating that there are sides you can't see being moved into view. Not to mention the shape of the shadow indicates it is spherical.
So, no, most people when it was possible to believe "the earth was flat" didn't consider the shape of the planet at all. And *flat* would be a bad idea to have anyway: it's obvious it's not *flat*.
Hail to our time traveling overlords!
I'm no astronomer, but as far as I can tell they observed some very red-shifted emission spectra, typical for a (closer) galaxy. Isn't it possible that the spectra comes from some gravitationally redshifted closer galaxy in front of the much distant and younger one? Given the fact that there is a (most) massive cluster "in the way" (creating the gravitational lens), is not there at least a possibility of the light coming from the depths of the cluster? Perhaps small part of some galaxy near a black hole there? That is - by chance - redshifted similarly as the (possible heavy elements free) farther galaxy? Guess not, since this is an article from Nature, and it would be the first question to ask yourself as an author. Anyhow, could anybody with more background comment on this? (not that I'm a big supporter of the theory of the big bang, quite on the contrary actually) PS: Wilco, forget sector HH, this is where the Sariens hid the Star generator looong ago ;-)
Obviously, God is getting better at creating new galaxies.
The CMB does not match a perfect black body, the perfect black body chart is and the CMB chart use different scales. Notice this is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org] is in frequency and this is in wavelength http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org] --- those are opposite units of measurements
Seriously? Wavelength and frequency have a very simple mathematical relationship between them, and depending on which subfield you are in, there may be a habit of plotting things versus one or the other. But that doesn't mean the results are different, and it is easy to convert between the two, with often plots looking similar if it is just a bump shape.
Do you also think anyone using a log plot is discussing something completely different? Or do you think that talking about car fuel economies with miles per gallon and liters per 100 km are completely unrelated?
You punting your self outside of the universe.. in a place which dose not exist.
then you try to measure the size of the place which dose, tell me how can you measuring from a place which dose not exist.
This is a logical fallacy. And if you measure from inside.. how would you know how big it is ? Where would the tap measure start and the end be ?.
for the real world all the statement's from supper position land are with meaning.
Let me see if I'm understanding correctly. (Someone correct me if I'm not.)
A quick Googling says the universe is 13.8 billion years old. Another quick Googling says the Milky Way is 13.2 billion years old. The galaxy in this article would be about 13.1 billion years old.
Since the summary says this is a "young" galaxy, does that mean most galaxies we see are older than 13.1 billion years?
It's a visitor from a different spacetime.
Your inability to understand what physicists are saying is not the physicists' fault.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That's what happens when you don't throw away everything in the old universe.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
How are we looking at a galaxy so very faint and very small — 13.1 billion lightyears away? If light took 13.1 billion years to reach us, that means such a galaxy was at that position 13.1 billion years ago — 700 million years after the big bang. Here's the kicker: What would we see if we were able to take the same photo of the same galaxy 700 million years ago? Would we see the big bang? The Earth was here at that time, so what's at play here?
Maybe some process in this early galaxy produced a high proportion of O and B class stars.
The big bang theory is just that: a theory. It is not yet proven indisputably as a law of nature.
New ideas and observations, such as this article on new equations and this article on lack of expected gravitational waves put the theorum to the test. Furthermore, the Pope declaring the 'big bang theory right' only increases the need to check our models and assumptions on this subject (and now that I think about it, wouldn't the church have a vested interest in a non-permanent universe to mesh with end-times dogma)?
At least until we get some indisputable evidence, we need to continue to question our theories, record our observations - and try to see where the puzzle pieces fit. Being a dogmatic scientist is worse than being ignorant - the scientist should know better.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
It had its left turn signal on for 2 billion years.
it's nearly 6k years old!
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Yes, that's my point exactly. They don't. Because they can't. Because the theory is based on assuming something happened that our physics can't describe. BB theory is therefore incomplete in a way that makes it unable to stand in the face of what at this time appear to be some very simple and reasonable questions. Questions physics force us to ask.
No. Quite wrong. The specific reason I use this analogy is that BB theory goes right to the ground -- fractions of fractions of fractions of a micrometer above -- such that the option of there being a pitcher or a ball launcher, or a firecracker under the ball, or a really strong dwarf cricket or even microbe, etc., has completely gone away. You cannot explain BB any further using our physics because they state that the theory covers it right back until it cannot. Consequently it either has to be some other physics, or else it's massively wrong. Theories that are rigorous but then, still within the context of their own propositions, devolve into "and then we don't know" or "because we have no idea"
BB theory may, as I said above, be quite correct, and we may need new physics to understand it. if that's the case, on that day, it becomes a complete and compelling theory to me. Until then, it's not.
As of right now, spotting a galaxy that shows what we understand to be evidence of being older than would be possible if BB theory is correct does not particularly surprise me, any more than finding evidence that "Thor" was just some dude with a really big hammer would surprise me in the context of the ideas that present the Æsir and Vanir as "gods." Because just as, at present, there are no physics that would actually make the idea of a god or gods credible in the face of objective, reality-based inquiry, there are no physics that actually make the idea of the BB credible in the face of same.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Which proves once more to not base judgement on appearances.