NRAO/AUI/NSF; D. Berry Posted on 12/06/2017 11:31:18 AM PST by Red Badger
Less than a billion years after the Big Bang, two titans speed toward each other.
NRAO/AUI/NSF; D. Berry
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Just 780 million years after the universe formed in the Big Bang, two galaxies speed to confront each other in a head-on collision that will lead to a merger between the two—and one of them is towing along a clump of dark matter larger than any spotted before.
The research paper, published today in Nature, highlights a little-understood era of the universe known as the Epoch of Reionization. This is when the first galaxies came together and lit up the universe by converting hydrogen from a neutral atom to an ionized state, making the universe more transparent.
Most galaxies of the era were believed to be small, low-mass dwarf galaxies. But the results of this study—and an unrelated paper also published in Nature today that highlights a supermassive black hole from this period, the oldest ever discovered—paint a different picture of the early universe. One of the galaxies in the pair known as SPT0311-58 is only slightly less massive than the Milky Way, though the other is much smaller.
The Milky Way's mass is equal to some 480 billion suns, while SPT0311-58 has about 440 billion solar masses. The smaller galaxy in the ancient pair is about 35 billion solar masses. A halo of dark matter surrounding the two is about 100 billion solar masses.
The galaxies, created via a composite image of several telescopes. ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Marrone, et al.; B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF); NASA/ESA Hubble ==========================================================================================
Though the dark matter halo can’t be seen, its presence is inferred through gravitational interactions with the galaxies, which suggest it is enveloping both as they merge. The galaxies are messy in appearance as they haven’t had time to settle into a spiral (or other) shape due to their relative youth.
According to a NRAO press release, there are more galaxies waiting to be discovered in the same field. The pair was discovered by the South Pole Telescope, which is specifically attuned to the early universe, and follow-up observations were made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).
“Our hope is to find more objects like this, possibly even more distant ones, to better understand this population of extreme dusty galaxies and especially their relation to the bulk population of galaxies at this epoch,” said Joaquin Vieira of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in a press release.
How the first galaxies formed in the ether of the early universe is one of the biggest questions in astronomy. Studying galaxies like SPT0311-58 could help scientists understand the strange dynamics of this ancient time in the cosmos.
Curvature of space-time relative to mass works pretty well for most folks.
Yes, but what ‘causes’ the curvature?..................
Mass. Or turtles.
It is the dawn of time.
This earth we know so well is a smoldering, inhospitable place.
No plants grow, no creature can survive.
The hard, implacable rocks that form our mountain ranges are being crushed and folded by forces that will take millions of years to shape.
These are the forces!
This is the power that drives the hand that drinks ‘Treadmill’, the mighty lager, with the world’s first great taste of fish!
“fudge factor” i.e. we don’t know anything except that it makes the equations work....
What is mass?..............
There are two competing theories: WIMP’s vs. MACHO’s. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles are hypothetical ghost particles that (besides gravitationally) interact only weakly or not at all with normal matter, sort of like the neutrino. But unlike the neutrino, they are massive enough to clump around galaxies. The room you’re sitting in could be filled with them but there is no way to detect them.
MAssive Compact Halo Objects are things like black holes, neutron stars, even brown dwarfs. But they would have to be in great enough numbers to account for all the mass of dark matter.
So far, ironically, WIMP’s seem to be winning out over MACHO’s as the leading theory.
The existence of Dark Matter was actually discovered by Fritz Zwicky back in 1933, when he noticed gravitational interactions between galaxy clusters that their visible mass couldn’t account for. He was an underrated scientist then and today.
If the universe is 13.8 billion years old, then Earth would need to be 13.8 billion - 0.8 billion (780mil) = 13.0 billion light years away from the big bank to intercept the light.
I've been told that inflation figures into it. But still Inflation plus the speed of the galaxy away from the big bang would have to equal (13.0/13.8)=94% of the speed of light for us to currently be intercepting light from 780 million years after the big bang.
Possibilities:
What is pedantry?
The earth is not the same age as the universe.
Sounds like a lot of speculation.
Ding..ding...ding
You win the post for this thread
‘Dark Matter’ is as real as AGW.
Attention to detail.................
Supposition.
Modern cosmologists invented dark matter to save the Standard Model, according to which, the universe should have flown apart by now.
Instead of questioning the fundamental validity of their underlying theories, they invent unobservable, unmeasureable phenomena that can't be checked or tested, to explain observations their theories have failed to predict.
Which makes it worse.
Gravity explained:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TbrGaQ9Zc0&list=PLwOAYhBuU3UeYFyfm2LilZldjJd48t6IY&index=61
Was there a Piper at the gates of dawn?
Exactly!
When actual observations falsify your cherished theories, the gods of Scientism command you to invent fairies and unicorns to explain it away.
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