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.

Comments

Re: That's no mere galaxy; that's GALACTUS

[MightyMartian]

Yes, the method where you come up with models with predictive power and test them against observation, as opposed to bring a pathetic loser who grape onto kookery in the vain hope that somehow it will make your intellectual laziness seem less obvious.

I spent years debating people like you, only to learn your type are too fundamentally pompous and inadequate to actually want to learn anything.

If it smells like a duck...

[fyngyrz]

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.