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Hubble Shatters the Cosmic Distance Record
An anonymous reader writes: One of the holy grails of cosmology is to measure, directly, exactly when the first stars and galaxies formed in our Universe. The Hubble Space Telescope has been pushing the distance record farther and farther back, with its measurements typically confirmed by ground-based, spectroscopic follow-ups. This time, however, the new record-holder was so distant that confirmation needed to be done from space: by Hubble itself. The result? A galaxy at a redshift of z=11.1, from when the Universe was just 400 million years old, or a mere 3% of its current age. This is a record that will likely stand until the James Webb Space Telescope launches, as it took a combination of incredible work and incredible luck to find a galaxy this far back with our current technology.
For fuck sake! STOP! Pushing Forbes for Science articles!!!
Has Forbes any kind of business relation with Slashdot? I can't find another explanation for the repetitive insistance on linking to it.
It this behavior is going to continue, paid links should at least be identified, so those of us who won't ever whitelist Forbes in our adblocks don't have to hover every link to avoid opening the Forbes spam over and over again.
When a site does let you in just because you have an Ad Blocker, mean I won't use it, I don't mind if they bitch about having an Ad Blocker but Forbes doesn't even let you past, of F*k off is all I have to say to them.
absolutely nobody knows what happened before this last Big Bang which supposedly started this universe..
Another apparent joke seems to be a recent computer simulation stating, that the chance that the only earth-like inhabitable planet is this earth, is high.
And this out of how many super-clusters consisting of spiral galaxies, with a total number of stars going into what - trillions...
And the gods exhaled... well, from where, what and when did they inhale to be able to exhale?
F*k off is all I have to say to them
I think that sentiment is mutual. Ads provide them with income and if you block them they don't want you there. Which is fine: their house, their rules. Should Slashdot link to such sites though? I don't know... what I do know is that Slashdot should stop linking to Forbes because it's a rubbish magazine: the articles are often about highly interesting subjects but they lack substance, and in most cases there are far better (and free) alternative sources.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This is one of the things which was discussed when there were requests for simple improvements so it's not something the new owners are unaware of. They are a publishing (and thus partly advertising) company. This is the time when they have to make a stand. Are they for acceptable (small a) advertising or are they going to push everyone to full on ad-blocking?
Demands for a fair slashdot:
CAPTCHA: outburst - hopefully of common sense but I doubt it.
Thanks to an incredible combination of luck, technology and human ingenuity, the Hubble Space Telescope has identified, measured and confirmed a galaxy farther away in space — and closer to the Big Bang — than ever before. Because the Universe is expanding, and the fabric of space in between galaxies expands as time goes on, the more distant a galaxy actually is, the more its emitted light gets stretched (or redshifted) before it reaches our eyes. Previously, the Universe’s most distant galaxy was known as EGS8p7, whose light was redshifted by an extra factor of 8.63 before it reached our eyes, telling us that it must have come from 13.24 billion years ago: when the Universe was just 573 million years old, or only 4% of its current age. But that record has been shattered, announced an international team of scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope.
The newest record-holder has had its light redshifted by a whopping factor of 11.1, meaning the light is even older: it was emitted 13.40 billion years ago, when the Universe was only 407 million years old, or closer in time to the Big Bang than any other galaxy ever seen before. “We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” announced Pascal Oesch, the principal investigator of this project. You have to be extremely not just skilled, but also extremely lucky to see a galaxy this far back in time using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Thanks to an incredible combination of luck, technology and human ingenuity, the Hubble Space Telescope has identified, measured and confirmed a galaxy farther away in space — and closer to the Big Bang — than ever before. Because the Universe is expanding, and the fabric of space in between galaxies expands as time goes on, the more distant a galaxy actually is, the more its emitted light gets stretched (or redshifted) before it reaches our eyes. Previously, the Universe’s most distant galaxy was known as EGS8p7, whose light was redshifted by an extra factor of 8.63 before it reached our eyes, telling us that it must have come from 13.24 billion years ago: when the Universe was just 573 million years old, or only 4% of its current age. But that record has been shattered, announced an international team of scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope.
The newest record-holder has had its light redshifted by a whopping factor of 11.1, meaning the light is even older: it was emitted 13.40 billion years ago, when the Universe was only 407 million years old, or closer in time to the Big Bang than any other galaxy ever seen before. “We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” announced Pascal Oesch, the principal investigator of this project. You have to be extremely not just skilled, but also extremely lucky to see a galaxy this far back in time using the Hubble Space Telescope.
The skill part is knowing that only the brightest galaxies at these great distances will be visible, since the apparent brightness falls off as the distance-to-the-source squared. The brightest light generated comes from the hottest, most massive stars, which not only predominantly emit ultraviolet light, but which ionize hydrogen atoms, causing the brightest and most powerful transition of all in a hydrogen atom: the Lyman- line, which comes at a wavelength of just 121.567 nanometers, well out of the visible-light range of ~400 to 700 nanometers. As you look farther and farther away, the redshift takes effect, meaning that this line gets shifted all the way through the visible light and into the infrared: to a new wavelength of 121.567 × (1 + 11.1), where 11.1 is the redshift, or 1471 nanometers. Hubble is equipped with a spectrograph, meaning it can break up the light into the individual
http://www.spacetelescope.org/...
hey slashdot editors, if you are reporting about space and/or science, stick with links to websites dedicated to that topic!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Well there's an interesting development, the story was *apparently* not submitted by StartsWithABang. But it's still his damn blog and the same damn summary that instantly makes it obvious who wrote it and that the link will end on the turd forbes.
So did Whiplash block StartsWithABlog from posting and now he's coming in through the back way?
I can't help but notice it was timothy again who edited and posted it to the front page. Is he on the take?
Here is a site reporting this story which is (1) NOT a disgusting malvertising tool like Forbes, and (2) a little closer to the source.
Even worse, the NASA site renders nothing with javascript disabled.
I can understand a site blocking users that don't generate revenue, but requiring scripts to display information funded by taxes doesn't feel right.