Hubble sees oldest galaxy yet


Recommended Posts

Somewhere out in the void ? 13.2 billion light years, give or take ? is a magnificent red blob, recently discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope. It's a galaxy ? or it was; it's long since flashed out of existence ? but far less beautiful or dramatic than nearly any galaxy the Hubble has spotted before. Its magnificence, instead, comes from its age.

The newly discovered star cluster ? a hundred times smaller than our own Milky Way ? was formed just 480 million years after the 13.7 billion year-old universe itself was born, making it easily the oldest galaxy ever found. As such, it provides astronomers a first-time glimpse at the universe in its R&D phase, when small, sloppy galaxies were being formed out of hot gas, then vanishing shortly after ? leaving the skies free for the huge and mature galactic swirls that would come along later.

Reported in this week's edition of Nature, the galaxy ? known, unpoetically, as UDFj-39546284.

Ultra-deep infrared is exactly what would be needed to spot something like UDFj-39546284, but even then it took about 100 hours of observing time spread across the summers of 2009 and 2010 for the galaxy to be fully visually resolved.

more

post-37120-0-65365300-1296143464.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

looks like it's shopped... just saying. some blurry zoomed in pixels got named as an official galaxy albeit named like it was a sony product.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Those stars are probably disintegrated and long gone.

And reformed into new stars and galaxies! Such is the cycle of matter in space :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And reformed into new stars and galaxies! Such is the cycle of matter in space :D

Even the matter you are made of has origins in stars, we are made up of atoms that were created in stars over the past ages of the universe. And one day, the atoms we contain will most likely once again become parts of new stars. The current model holds that the first generation of stars made the lighter elements, and the heavier elements were made in later generations.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And reformed into new stars and galaxies! Such is the cycle of matter in space :D

Or black holes ;)

Well I did learn how to calculate the age of a galaxy in college, I?m pretty sure. I need to clean the dust on this book and read it all, it was really the most interesting class I?ve taken.

I didn?t go there at university because unfortunately, from what I heard, it becomes so picky and precise that it?s boring. My class was really general and I loved it.

Oh well, if I hate what I?m doing I know where I need to go !

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.