Posted on 12/09/2015 7:35:23 PM PST by MtnClimber
They're big, they're bright, they're beautifulâand they shouldn't even exist, at least to our current astronomical knowledge: gargantuan spiral galaxies that make our giant Milky Way seem downright modest. Spirals are supposed to be small fry compared to the greatest giant ellipticals, which are football-shaped swarms of stars thought to be the universeâs biggest and brightest galaxies. But now a search across billions of light-years has snared a rare breed of "super spiral" galaxies that rival their giant elliptical peers in size and luminosity, raising questions over how such behemoths are born. "I was really surprised," says Patrick Ogle, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology who discovered the super spirals earlier this year. Ogle looked for them by analyzing the NASA Extragalactic Database, an online compendium of galaxy information. He examined nearly 800,000 galaxies within 3.5 billion light-years of Earth, ranking them by luminosityâin particular, by how much visible light they radiate.
Young earth adherents are free to believe what they want, but the Bible isn’t inconsistent with a much, much older universe. The creation was only 6 “days” of work for God (per the Bible), but how can one possibly assign a time scale to an eternal being? It sounds more like God was explaining it to man in terms that man could understand, but that 6 days for God could have been billions of years or nanoseconds. He’s outside of human time scales. Adam may have been created billions of years after the start of the universe.
lol
I’d make a joke about the smaller galaxies and “shrinkage” but would rather go out on a “high note.”
Google WMAP.
Briefly, WMAP was a satellite that mapped the cosmic background radiation of the Universe to determine its geometry and size. It was the successor of the COBE satellite which did the same thing but at much less precision. The data from WMAP suggest that the geometry of the Universe is flat and Euclidean which implies that the Universe is infinite and infinitely expanding.
From now on, you’ll be known as “T-Bone”!!
“Briefly” does not cut it. Prove it.
Back in the early 80s, the last time I heard a lecture on it, the farthest “edge” of the universe that could be detected with the radiotelescopes we had at that time was 12 Billion Light Years from Earth.
I think our equipment has improved, AND the Universe has expanded a bit in thirty-some years.
Cue the intergalactic crooner who is in the fridge during Monty Python’s live organ donation service skit....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk
Wait. Isn’t this supposed to be “settled science”?
Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. The universe is 13 billion across.
My question is what is beyond the universe?
OK. Possibly dumb question: If the fastest matter can travel is the speed of light, how could the diameter of the universe be more more light years than the age of the universe in years?
Wouldn’t matter take 92 billion years to travel 92 billion light years at the speed of light?
Isn’t the universe only about 15 billion years old.
The Radius of the observable universe is about 15,000,000,000 light years.
whoops, thanks fmdj, I’d missed your ping, will do one to APoD later today.
Thanks fieldmarshaldj, extra to APoD.
It’s also hard to imagine all matter pulses into non locality several million times a second.
Oh please do explain in layman’s terms what that means.
Half the time matter does not exist.
It’s hard to imagine a million acre wildfire could start from a single carelessly discarded match.
Smokey Bear isn’t in the Bible, so he must be a satanic liar.
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