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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.

3 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Early Universe by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Informative

    Uh no, the Big Bang explains the ratios of hydrogen, helium and lithium in the observable universe. All the other elements were created when the first stars went supernova. That is rather the point of the nucleosynthesis line of evidence.

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    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  2. Re:Quick, make up something dark by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The "dark" stuff is essentially a placeholder, its a different way of saying "we don't have the foggiest what is going on heree".

  3. Re:The Big Bang Is Obsolete by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Frequency and wavelengths are simply different ways to describe the same thing, periodicity of a wave. They are not "opposite units", just inverse of each other, like resistance and conductivity they describe the same bloody thing and you can convert at will. Look at your first link again, how is that not a perfect match?