Posted on 11/11/2017 11:34:42 PM PST by ETL
Astronomers have uncovered an ancient cosmic artifact 11 billion light-years from Earth: the oldest spiral galaxy ever seen.
The newly discovered galaxy, known as A1689B11, is an ancestor of modern spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way, which are defined by long tentacles of gas, dust and stars that wrap around the galaxy's central bulge.
"Spiral galaxies are exceptionally rare in the early universe, and this discovery opens the door to investigating how galaxies transition from highly chaotic, turbulent discs to tranquil, thin discs like those of our own Milky Way galaxy," Renyue Cen, a co-author of the new paper describing the findings and a senior research astronomer at Princeton University, said in a statement.
Galaxies come in many different shapes and sizes, and researchers think many spiral galaxies form mainly through mergers of smaller elliptical galaxies, although many factors can affect how a galaxy changes its shape over time, according to NASA. Elliptical galaxies are disks that can be mostly circular or very elongated but lack the arm-like features of spiral galaxies.
Astronomer Edwin Hubble was one of the first people to theorize that elliptical galaxies evolved to form spiral galaxies, although he did not fully appreciate the complexity of galaxy evolution, according to the European Space Agency's Hubble Space Telescope website. Nonetheless, researchers still refer to the time in cosmic history when spiral galaxies began to form from elliptical galaxies as "the Hubble sequence."
"Studying ancient spirals like A1689B11 is a key to unlocking the mystery of how and when the Hubble sequence emerges," Cen said in the statement from Swinburne University in Australia (where some of the other co-authors are based). Previously, researchers reported finding spiral galaxies that date back 10.7 billion years.
The newly discovered galaxy is too far away to be observed directly with modern instruments. So the researchers took advantage of a natural phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, in which the gravity of a massive object (like a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies) bends and amplifies the light from an object that lies beyond it (as seen by an observer). In this way, the authors of the new research paper were able to detect light from the very distant spiral galaxy A1689B11 by looking for the effects of gravitational lensing around the edge of a galaxy cluster that is nearer to Earth.
The observations were conducted using an instrument called the Near-infrared Integral Field Spectrograph on the Gemini North telescope, located on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The researchers were able to "look 11 billion years back in time and directly witness the formation of the first, primitive spiral arms of a galaxy," Cen said in the statement.
Because light travels at a finite speed, the light from A1689B11 left that galaxy 11 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 3 billion years old. In this way, astronomers can look back in time and learn about the history of the universe through direct observations.
I suggest that if you intend to visit, book passage on a very, very fast vessel, so that time, as you experience it, will be much, much less than 11 billion years.
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201412/muon.cfm
As a practical matter, even if the vessel’s speed is constrained only by accelerations that humans can survive, it might take several lifetimes to complete the journey.
To your twin brother on earth the journey will still take at least 22 billion years, so things might change in the meantime. The sun will be dwarf, and the earth will probably not survive, but if it does, it will be little more than a cold cinder. It’s unlikely you will recognize your old neighborhood.
“Non-visible/optical images (infrared, UV, gamma, microwave, radio, etc) are typically converted to false color images in order that there is something for people to see and study.”
I don’t know which type of eye-candy I like better, super-enhanced digital images of galaxies, stars and nebulae light years away or some of the cars I’ve been seeing in HDTV on the Barrett-Jackson and Mecum auto auctions.
“What exactly are you referring to? “
11 billion years does not equate to 11 light years.
Years is a measure of time, but a light-year is a measure of distance.
It would still be 11 billion light years away, whatever that would be in miles or other distance unit of measure.
I explained in post 2 that I simply made a mistake leaving out billion in the first part of the post, but had it in the final part. And I know that a light-year is a distance. I think I made that pretty clear.
“That is, it’s ‘11 light-years away’, where ONE light-year, the *distance* light travels in a year at its fixed speed of 186,000 miles per second, works out to about 5.9 TRILLION miles. And so this ancient galaxy is 5.9 trillion x 11 billion miles away.”
...and as was pointed out by another poster and in the piece I followed up with on “Distances in an expanding universe”, the actual distance may be much more than 11 billion light years.
Kind of look looks like a swastika?
That’s one interpretation, by far the most common one. There’s another one, you say, ‘Civ? That guy, he never gives up... ;^)
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/haltonarp/index?tab=articles
Long ago and far, far away! LOL!
Cosmology and astronomy are simply fascinating!
I remember back in the mid-eighties when galactic lensing was first discovered. It was puzzling at the time and was described as McDonald arches in deep space. LOL It wasn’t much longer until explanations were rolled out.
Einstein once said that an Earthling observer, if his eyes were like telescopes, could see the farthest objects, and if the observer had ENOUGH time, eventually he would see...
The back of his head!
Oops! Post 33 was meant for another thread.
Sorry.
Here is video of the flight of the space probe.
Turns out there is a giant little girl in that galaxy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWwhQB3TKXA
That was because he mistakenly believe the universe, due to gravitational attraction, would eventually collapse upon itself. ie, be a "closed universe". But observations at the time seemed to indicate that the universe was "static". This was why he concocted the "cosmological constant", which was to be some mysterious anti-gravity force that would precisely balance out regular gravity.
Then when it was discovered that the universe was actually not static, but rather expanding, he called his introduction of the CC the 'greatest blunder' of his life. Turned out many years later that the universe is not simply expanding, but accelerating, as if there actually were some anti-gravity force pushing galaxies apart.
A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real time................
Yes, I have wondered for years why nobody ever thought of that.
This ‘old galaxy’ might just be US!..........
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