[Tim_Lou]

http://physicsweb.org/article/news/8/3/1

Galaxy breaks distance record
1 March 2004

Astronomers have discovered a galaxy some 13 200 billion light years away - the most distant galaxy ever seen. Light from this galaxy, known as Abell 1835 IR1916, provides information about the universe when it was just 3% of its current age. The light was emitted about 470 million years after the big bang and could tell us more about how the first galaxies formed after the "dark ages" in the early universe (R Pelló et al. 2004 Astronomy & Astrophysics to be published).



A galaxy far away

When hot hydrogen cooled to form galaxies in the early universe, intense far-ultraviolet radiation was emitted as electrons in the atoms fell from excited states to the ground state. This so-called Lyman alpha emission is a tell-tale signature of galaxy formation and has a characteristic wavelength of 121.6 nanometres. However, this radiation has been red-shifted to longer wavelengths by the expansion of the universe, and astronomers can calculate the age of a galaxy by measuring the red-shift of its Lyman alpha line.

Roser Pelló of the Observatoire Midi- Pyrénées in France, Daniel Schaerer of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland and colleagues took images of the galaxy cluster Abell 1835 with the ISAAC instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. This cluster behaves as a gravitational lens and allows astronomers to study galaxies otherwise too faint to be seen.

The French-Swiss team detected a weak but clear feature in the spectrum of Abell 1835 IR1916 that they believe is the Lyman alpha line red-shifted to a wavelength of 1337 nanometres in the near-infrared region of the spectrum. This corresponds to a red-shift of 10, which is significantly higher than the previous record of 6.6.

Moreover, Pelló, Schaerer and co-workers calculated that the galaxy is undergoing a period of intense star formation and that it has produced some 10 million solar masses worth of stars. The team says that these stars - which may have been the "building blocks" of today's large galaxies - could have provided the first light sources that put an end to the dark ages in the early universe.

Author
Belle Dumé is Science Writer at PhysicsWeb

found it in a website...
the light came from this galaxy is so long ago, i wonder if that galaxy still even exist or not...

[deamonstar]

I would imagine that that galaxy is still around, alive and well... if not a bit more plump than it was as we see it now. considering that galaxies can continue to grow and live for 100's perhaps 1,000's of billions of years.

[Tim_Lou]

think about all those galaxies, its really fantasy.
we can only see the tiny bit of light come from them, and all the lights are history, millions and millions years ago. there must be lots of crazy stuffs in there which no one can imagine...

they seem to be exist, but is it really?? maybe the "God" is fooling us by those "illusions"!
(well, jsut some of my feelings.)

[corybant]

At about the time our Solar system came into existence, the light Hubble is now

detecting had already travelled ten billion light-years. Whereabout in the expanding

universe were the atoms which make up the Solar system at that time?. And how

(without travelling faster than light) did they stay ahead of that ancient light to neatly

catch (four and a half billion years later) those tired photons, with the magical mitt of

the Hubble?.

Look at this another way.

Two atoms moving apart since the Big Bang in an expanding universe at a fraction of

the speed of light. Can they ever be as far apart as the number of light-years corresponding

to the current estimated age of the universe.?

[Tormod]

You folks are forgetting the entire concept of inflation, which is a vital part of the current bang theory. Right after the big bang (the first fractions of a second, the universe expanded at an incredible rate, multipling the size in a very short time.

This means that the expansion rate of the universe was much faster than the speed of light (and remember, at this point in time the physical forces had not yet separated - this is the bases of string theory: trying to find out at what point they were one and the same).

So the energy within the early universe was spread out faster than the speed of light.

It does not make sense to ask "where was the milky way when it was created", because the universe does not have a center.

Yet, if we view the universe as a flat sphere, the sphere would be more than 30 billion light years across. This is a simple deduction: When we peer into the universe, we can see about 13 billion light years - in every direction. Add to that the expansion which occured during inflation and you get a higher number still. So the distance between two points in the universe can be much higher than the age of the universe.

Tormod

[nick33]

The farthest galaxies shake the big bang
You must see this
http://www.world-mysteries.com/toi_esavov.htm