Posted on 12/01/2011 9:03:11 AM PST by decimon
Cambridge, MA - In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies. And while astronomers can describe the members of this new "species," they can't explain what makes them so ruddy.
"We've had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations," said Jiasheng Huang of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Huang is lead author on the paper announcing the find, which was published online by the Astrophysical Journal.
Spitzer succeeded where Hubble failed because Spitzer is sensitive to infrared light - light so red that it lies beyond the visible part of the spectrum. The newfound galaxies are more than 60 times brighter in the infrared than they are at the reddest colors Hubble can detect.
Galaxies can be very red for several reasons. They might be very dusty. They might contain many old, red stars. Or they might be very distant, in which case the expansion of the universe stretches their light to longer wavelengths and hence redder colors (a process known as redshifting). All three reasons seem to apply to the newfound galaxies.
All four galaxies are grouped near each other and appear to be physically associated, rather than being a chance line-up. Due to their great distance, we see them as they were only a billion years after the Big Bang - an era when the first galaxies formed.
(Excerpt) Read more at cfa.harvard.edu ...
Red state ping.
Ultra-red galaxy in morning,
Space traveler take warning...
Reagonomics goes galatic
El-i-ot /obscure
Red kryptonite= emo Superman
Red-Light District.
minmitar space
Far out, man!
Now if they can just up the photo resolution and pick out the planet Krypton (or the debris from its destruction) the loop will be closed. On a related subject, how strange is it that Superman was actually born in the minds of two guys from our little punchline city of Cleveland?
I didn’t need a crystal ball to know that picture would be posted. ;-)
Dang! Just read this and scrolled down... I was going to say it’s no big deal, I had an Ultra Red Galaxy when I was 19...
Nice job.
Those jets emitting from the upper right one look like the ejecta from a black hole. That would seem to support the hypothesis that the images are red-shifted.
Very old stars in a universe that was then only one billion years old? Once again, our increasing capacity for making reliable new observations at the outer limits is challenging orthodox cosmology and physical theory.
How long before Einstein’s Relativity, Big Bang Theory and Standard Models, or at least Hubble’s doppler theory gets set aside for a better theory of everything? Or do we keep on limping along with a Ptolemaic patchwork quilt of ill-matched microtheories that struggle to maintain coherence with one another?
Big science, like politics, has been ossified by bureaucrats. At least in science, we need revolutionaries.
I’m fine with changing theories because that’s what they are.
On one of his last shows, Glenn Beck had a child savant on the show who says he’s going to prove Einstein wrong on relativity and I hope he does.
I know there’s growing acceptance that the single Chixalub impact may not have been the primary dinosaur extinction event.
It’s simple. These galaxies are embarrassed.
Red Dwarf is getting ready to film their tenth season. Special effects is’ll.
thinking the same thing....
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