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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.
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
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.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"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///
The Big Bang wasn't an explosion; it was a rapid expansion of all space. There is no center.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Unfortunately pop-science always shows this as a classic explosion. Not only that, but it shows it exploding into space. :/
Explosion is an awful word because of all the semantic baggage. I prefer expansion, as does the vastr bulk of cosmologists. Inflation was also coupled with a period of supercooling, making it even less like an explosion in any classical sense.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Obviously an advanced life form has worm holed their entire galaxy to an earlier time.
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
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.
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.
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 ;-)
The big bang hypothesis is based on two things:
It is based on a bit more than 2 things. Early elemental abundance, cosmic microwave background radiation, large scale structure or lack thereof... etc.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Naw...distance is probably determined by red shifted light spectrum... so unless there is a huge, mass of some kind, something grossly larger than anything theorized to date, out there....hmmm
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
Sure the galaxy is 13.1 billion years old now. But we are seeing it as it was when it was much less than 700 million years old. So, we're "seeing" a young galaxy, regardless of how long ago it was formed.
Big Bang did not happen in one spot. It happened everywhere. Including where we are. Space itself expanded.
The universe continues to expand, and the distance to the parts the farthest away from us is growing faster than the speed of light, meaning that they disappear from our view, and we can never observe them again, except for the influence they have had on areas of space closer to us.
But both those parts and where we are were where big bang happened.
For a while after the big bang, the universe was opaque, so there would be nothing to see.
True. For those not familiar, after the big bang, the universe was really hot. Too hot for matter like we know it to even exist for long. A newly formed electron would just collide with another newly created electron or photons of sufficient energy to turn it also back to energy. As space time expanded, things cooled down because the energy density was reduced to the point that particles could form and not turn be turned back into energy. Even after normal particles of matter were able to exist, it was still to hot to form atoms as the electrons would constantly be stripped off. Thus all the matter was in a plasma. Plasma, as a charged particle, will happily interact with EM waves, and since the universe was full of this plasma, the universe was opaque because the mean path that a photon could travel before interacting with a charged particle, being absorbed and then being re-emitted was quite small. We saw the same effect with the space shuttle when it re-entered the atmosphere. During a period of its re-entry, the air became a plasma and essentially opaque to any sort of radio communication, so their was always a period of time when the space shuttle could not communicate with the ground as it landed.