Posted on 03/21/2005 7:00:41 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Astronomers have found distant red galaxiesvery massive and very oldin the universe when it was only 2.5 billion years post Big Bang. Previous observations suggested that the universe at this age was home to young, small clumps of galaxies long before they merged into massive structures we see today, remarked Carnegie Observatories Ivo Labbé, who led the group of astronomers in the study. [Members of the research project are listed at the end of the original article.] We are really amazed these are the earliest, oldest galaxies found to date. Their existence was not predicted by theory and it pushes back the formation epoch of some of the most massive galaxies we see today."
About two years ago, astronomers from Leiden (The Netherlands) using the European ground-based Very Large Telescope found a population of distant red galaxies in the near infrared. But the images could not ascertain what made the galaxies red: Were they old and dead and no longer forming stars, or were massive amounts of dust obscuring star-forming regions?
The Labbé-led group used the infrared-imaging Spitzer Space Telescope to analyze the content of the new galactic population to address the questions of age, stellar mass, and activity. Giovanni Fazio (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), a co-author on the study, said, "Spitzer offers capabilities that the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments don't, giving us a unique way to study very distant galaxies long ago that eventually became the galaxies we see around us now."
The team was particularly surprised to find very old, red galaxies that had stopped forming new stars altogether. They had rapidly formed massive amounts of stars out of gas much earlier in the universe's history, but then suddenly starved to death, raising the question of what caused them to die so early. Such "red and dead" galaxies may be the forefathers of some of the old and giant elliptical galaxies seen in the local universe today.
In addition to the old "dead galaxies long past star formation, there were other red, dusty galaxies still vigorously producing stars. Jiasheng Huang (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) said, "We're detecting galaxies we never expected to find, having a wide range of properties we never expected to see." Apparently, the early universe was already a wildly complex place. "It's becoming more and more clear that the young universe was a big zoo with animals of all sorts," continued Labbé. "There's as much variety in the early universe as we see around us today."
Ultimately, these studies will help to unravel how galaxies like our Milky Way assembled and how they got to look the way they appear today. The research will be published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal (Letters).
No, facts do not change. No one said any facts changed. What changed were the predictions made by the current theory. Man, talk about grasping at something not in evidence.
I can't help with the car, but perhaps if you switched to CP/M you could solve the booting problems.
Yes, God IS Awesome. Religion and Science are NOT incompatible.
I have a Smith Corona daisywheel with mine. I still regret that I didn't spring for the 300 baud modem. I could cruise the internet without fear of virus.
Let's face it, real technology to really start viewing and mapping the expanse of the cosmos is less then 20 years old. Scientists are too smug in my opinion for the little bit of truth we have yet uncovered.
I think it will be another 100 before we know enough to propel technology to the next level of an actual exploration stage beyond our solar system.
At one time the earth and sea seemed so huge when it took a couple hundred days to travel across it. Space is much bigger and more complex but ultimately explorable.
This puts a new spin on the old liberal slogan "better red than dead." You can be both.
bump for later reading
Impressive. I wrote some stuff in Basic for mine, but I never attempted the more sophisticated stuff.
The science writing media usually doesn't tell the whole story, for whatever reason. The universe is, according to the current BB theory, 1050 times bigger than what the Hubble can see. Don't know if that changes anything in our own worldview. It's like picking out one grain of sand in the entire planet earth and that is all Hubble can see. That's us, insignificant even on terms of a single grain of sand.
"So, can we have your liver?" -- Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
Yeah. It's in surprisingly good shape. Just so that Michael Schiavo doesn't get to decide when.
Egads! Flashback time! Worked with both of those puppies back in the Pleistocene age of computing. Before that the real fun was patch-cord programming one of these beasties:
Yeppers! Remember that very well; I took a FORTRAN course in the mid-70s (at San Jose State) and that was the standard deal: get a programming assignment, type up your keypunch cards (and pray you made no typos), submit the deck to IT for a batch job sometime during the night, come back the next day and hope everything worked.
Brrrrrrrap-braappp-brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrappppp very-long-and-scary-pause brrrrrrrrrrap-brap-brrrrrrrrrrrrrrap!
"Syntax error in line 110"
;-)
This thread is a surprise. The fish evolution thread I also posted this morning, which I assumed would go nowhere because fish just aren't a juicy topic, has twice as many posts. Not that either thread has all that many. But I thought cosmology would be more popular than fish. Some days it just doesn't work out.
They'll tax ANYthing!
Someone better point this fact out to the Dems, though...
Excellent pun!
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