Oldest, farthest galaxy ever seen?

Oldest, farthest galaxy ever seen?

News Services
January 26, 2011

Hubble's still got it. The aging space telescope has glimpsed a presumed galaxy that just be the oldest thing ever seen, a small, hot affair that blazed to life during the childhood of the cosmos.

It is a smudge of light only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way galaxy, and it existed when the universe was only 480 million years old. Its light has been on its way to us for 13.2 billion years, making it the long-distance champion in an expanding universe.

If confirmed, the discovery takes astronomers deep into an era when stars and galaxies were first lighting up the universe and burning their way out of a primordial fog known as the dark ages. The birth rate of stars, they concluded, increased tenfold in the 200 million years between the time of the newly discovered galaxy and the next earliest known galaxies, which date to 650 million years after the Big Bang -- a rate even faster than astronomers had thought.

"This is clearly an era when galaxies were evolving rapidly," the astronomers said in Wednesday's journal Nature. The team was led by Rychard Bouwens of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Leiden Observatory, and Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Although NASA's nearly 21-year-old Hubble has offered a generation's worth of spectacular images -- sparkling galaxies and stunning star clusters -- its latest is just a smudge. In 2009, shortly after Hubble was refurbished with a camera with 40 times the sensitivity of its predecessor, operators turned the telescope toward a dark pocket in the southern sky and "bored a hole," in the words of one enthusiast, funneling a trickle of light thrown off by the most ancient stuff we've ever seen.

The Ultra Deep Field displays a roiling zoo of galaxies -- thin ones, fat ones, cigars, pinwheels, discs, and clouds. But the oldest galaxy is nothing but a smear. After a year of testing, the team concluded that it was the most primordial galaxy yet found. Spectroscopic observations with the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope are needed to cement the identification.

"The idea that you can detect something from the beginning of cosmic time by looking at a patch of sky for 87 hours is just wild," Bouwens said.

Or as Harvard astronomer Daniel Fabricant puts it: "If true, the discovery would be a very big deal."

TexasBlue wrote:Its light has been on its way to us for 13.2 billion years,

Surely this is a mistake. They must mean 6000 years. 6000's the max. :-D

Yeah... forgot about that part.

kronos wrote:

TexasBlue wrote:Its light has been on its way to us for 13.2 billion years,

Surely this is a mistake. They must mean 6000 years. 6000's the max. :-D

To be fair though.... I dug up quite a bit of the lies being told about her a couple months ago. Here's one of many I posted in this one thread. Of course, I don't see the need to turn this thread into a political one since it's a science thread. We can always carry on with the thread in in this link here.

Lol, I wasn't thinking of her specifically. I didn't even know who you talking about till I clicked the link. 'Twas a jab at creationists in general.

kronos wrote:

TexasBlue wrote:Its light has been on its way to us for 13.2 billion years,

Surely this is a mistake. They must mean 6000 years. 6000's the max. :-D

Yes, the evolutionists are working from a false assumption and that leads to the circular reasoning that the universe is older than The Bible says it is

That false assumption being the religion of evolutionism which worships Darwin instead of God and claims a cockroach can turn into a whale.

And nobody has ever seen a whale give birth to a cat.

The_Amber_Spyglass wrote:And nobody has ever seen a whale give birth to a cat.

My grandmother is actually my younger sister.