Slashdot Mirror
Caltech Astronomers Discover Oldest Galaxy Yet Known
An anonymous reader writes: Caltech astronomers have discovered a galaxy believed to be the oldest and farthest ever observed. They estimate it to be 13.2 billion years old. The universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old. The discovery may lead to a revision of theories of age and evolution of the early universe. The team published their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
A tenth of a billion is 100 million, so 600 million years younger, not 600 thousand.
Slashdot editors, not so much. Still, the linked article is an interesting read.
How do they determine distance based on redshift? Isn't redshift caused by a velocity difference?
Get off my plasma!
Table-ized A.I.
They estimate it to be 13.2 billion years old, making it only about 600,000 years younger than the Big Bang.
Only out by a factor of 1000. Not bad.
I don't suppose anyone will actually bother editing it to stop Slashdot looking like an idiot.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Maybe cosmologists will find someone out there to give you the cure or fusion power, However I subscribe to that intelligent lifeforms will look at that post and deem us not sufficiently advanced for first contact
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
However, within the next 10 years I suspect they will start finding galaxies older than the big bang.
What would be even better, would be blueshifted galaxies from a different big bang. That would raise some eyebrows...
This is true. However, within the next 10 years I suspect they will start finding galaxies older than the big bang.
You can, of course, suspect what you like, but out of curiousity why? What we see is remarkably consistent with a big bang. The very old galaxies we
see are small and poorly structured, as we would expect, the CMB is still there, etc.
Rounding.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
As others have been noting, the editors' math was off. 600,000,000 years is consistent. The nebula and stars would be extremely metal-poor (i.e. hardly any elements other than H and He).
Luke, help me take this mask off
You have no grasp of Cosmology _at_ _all_.
Part of what this makes News is that we now have a target to analyze Spectroscopically.
Nucleosynthesis in first generation Galaxies is still opaque to us; we can replicate various Models at Accelerators, but we still have no clue as to which Models are correct and most probable.
Screw you and whatever Tinker-Toy Tech education that you have. You sure as hell have no place in the Academia that you so despise.
You have no grasp of Cosmology _at_ _all_.
Part of what this makes News is that we now have a target to analyze Spectroscopically.
Nucleosynthesis in first generation Galaxies is still opaque to us; we can replicate various Models at Accelerators, but we still have no clue as to which Models are correct and most probable.
Screw you and whatever Tinker-Toy Tech education that you have. You sure as hell have no place in the Academia that you so despise.
Thank you for making my point for me.
> Cosmology serves as an object lesson in what happens when you let academics get entrenched
They get to see the handwriting of God, writ large in the universe around us? They explain the very origins of matter, and solve Fermi's Paradox? They help provide a sense of scale to our image of ourselves in the universe? They confirm the interactions of gravity and light, fundamental forces in physics? They explain the concentrations of different types of matter in the universe? They explain and reveal the nature of background radiation that affect electronics, and weather?
It's amazing how looking at the largest scales of the universe leads back to information about the smallest scales of the universe, and both _do_ affect every day life. We just tend not to notice that from day to day.
What we are seeing is not a galaxy that is 13.2 billion years old. Rather, we are seeing a galaxy as it existed 13.2 billion years ago. It is actually quite young, for a galaxy.
Thanks for that. You just made my day.
blah
In 1920, we thought the entire universe was our galaxy. Think about that, you provincial halfwit.
Thank the Astronomers. Cosmologists were just as dogmatically certain then as they are now.
> Cosmology serves as an object lesson in what happens when you let academics get entrenched
They get to see the handwriting of God, writ large in the universe around us? They explain the very origins of matter, and solve Fermi's Paradox? They help provide a sense of scale to our image of ourselves in the universe? They confirm the interactions of gravity and light, fundamental forces in physics? They explain the concentrations of different types of matter in the universe? They explain and reveal the nature of background radiation that affect electronics, and weather?
It's amazing how looking at the largest scales of the universe leads back to information about the smallest scales of the universe, and both _do_ affect every day life. We just tend not to notice that from day to day.
More the case they fancy themselves the theologians of science.
Nope it will be falling ratings.
Actually, they observed a galaxy with a redshift of 8.86. It is *assumed* that such a redshift is due to both Hubble expansion of space and relative velocity to us. Then an age and distance is calculated. However the underlying assumptions may be wrong.
Oldies are goodies.
Indeed. What made this galaxy stand out is that they found it on the southbound 405 doing 35 mph... in the passing lane... with it's left turn indicator blinking...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
But you get it all wrong, see. Unless you can use it to build a bigger bomb or increase next quarter's earnings per share, knowledge isn't worth acquiring. /s
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
I'm not too keen on argumentum ad cancerhasn'tbeencuredyet. In reality research in different areas inform each other. Solid State Physics (or Squalid State Physics), useful in medicine (and indeed the technology of cancer research and treatment), informs theoretical physics and hence cosmology. Cosmological observations help verify and direct theoretical physics research, that feeds back into squalid state physics, and so on.
The more general press releases show a galaxy with lots of resolved stars. Imknow that cant be true.
In what way have cosmologists solved Fermi's Paradox?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'm sorry, I mentioned the wrong paradox. They have contributed to understanding the Fermi Paradox solution by setting an upper bound to the size and age of the perceptible universe, and a maximum age of the components for complex chemistry that might sustain life.
The paradox they really solved is Ober's Paradox, which involves a tradeoff between the density of glowing objects like stars, and how many are in a volume, and why the more distant stars do not radiate so much light to be seen, even faintly, at Earth that the night sky is uniformly as bright as the Sun. The answer is that, as more distant galaxies recede at greater and greater speeds, their light is red-shifted and less energetic. And they've established an initial start and thus a maximum radius for our universe, so there are no perceptible sources of light from outside that radius.