The most distant protocluster of galaxies

[Drone]

Using the Subaru Telescope, a team of Japanese astronomers has discovered the most distant protocluster of galaxies ever found - one that existed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. The astronomers were able to directly observe this cluster of galaxies at an early stage in galaxy evolution, when structures were beginning to form in the early Universe. This discovery will be an important step on the way to understanding structure formation and galaxy evolution.



Objects circled in red are galaxies 12.7 billion light-years away.

Awesome news. Such structures are very faint and rare. This structure is less than 1 billion years younger than Big Bang.

http://phys.org/news/2012-05-subaru-...-galaxies.html

[Drone]

Bump

Another really distant and faint object!

See the green source near the center of the image cutout.

Astronomers at Arizona State University have found an exceptionally distant galaxy, ranked among the top 10 most distant objects currently known in space. Light from the recently detected galaxy (located 13 billion light-years away) left the object about 800 million years after the beginning of the universe, when the universe was in its infancy.

Well done.

The galaxy, designated LAEJ095950.99+021219.1, was first spotted in summer 2011. The find is a rare example of a galaxy from that early epoch, and will help astronomers make progress in understanding the process of galaxy formation. The find was enabled by the combination of the Magellan telescopes' tremendous light gathering capability and exquisite image quality, thanks to the mirrors built in Arizona's Steward Observatory; and by the unique ability of the IMACS instrument to obtain either images or spectra across a very wide field of view.

This is indeed a very tough and difficult task

This galaxy is extremely faint and was detected by the light emitted by ionized hydrogen. Researchers employed a unique technique they pioneered that uses special narrow-band filters that allow a small wavelength range of light through.

http://phys.org/news/2012-06-asu-ast...nt-galaxy.html

[Inceptor]

It's nice to see that astronomers are finally getting more data from the edge of our 'visual' horizon.
It always makes me wonder if anything interesting is now going on beyond our horizon, in the now tens of billions of light years of extra space that has opened up since the time, 13 billion years ago, when this light from this galaxy started its journey to us, here.

[Drone]

bump

Now ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) reveals constituent of a galaxy at 12.4 billion light-years away. ALMA observes celestial objects at submillimeter wavelength, which penetrates through dust clouds (which block visible light).

Researchers from Japan and Europe, have observed a "submillimeter galaxy" located about 12.4 billion light-years away using ALMA, and has successfully detected an emission line from nitrogen contained in that galaxy.

That's cool.

Comparisons between the data obtained by ALMA and numerical models revealed that the elemental composition of this galaxy in the early universe, at only 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang, was already close to the elemental composition of the present universe.

http://phys.org/news/2012-06-alma-re...y-billion.html

[hat]

Originally Posted by Inceptor

It's nice to see that astronomers are finally getting more data from the edge of our 'visual' horizon.
It always makes me wonder if anything interesting is now going on beyond our horizon, in the now tens of billions of light years of extra space that has opened up since the time, 13 billion years ago, when this light from this galaxy started its journey to us, here.

The way I always thought it worked was that empty space is infinite, and the expanding space is objects drifting further apart from each other.

[D007]

Cool stuff, they are really getting out there now a days..
But there is one thing we still cannot escape in regards to the visible universe.. Our universal constant, the speed of light.. We can't see any further, because light hasn't gone any further.. No idea how big the universe really is.. It's like having a solid black balloon, inside a balloon. You can't know how big the outer balloon is, because you can't see it.

[Pioneer.twelve]

What I would do to be able to travel amongst the stars...

[D007]

Originally Posted by Pioneer.twelve

What I would do to be able to travel amongst the stars...

Just jump... Really hard...
You have to believe...

[Drone]

Originally Posted by hat

empty space is

There's no such thing as <empty> space. Space itself is already something.

Originally Posted by Pioneer.twelve

What I would do to be able to travel amongst the stars...

Intergalactic travel would be amazing. If human race wants to survive sooner or later they have to find a way to make it possible. Without superluminal motion (which most likely don't even exist) that'd be really hard. Maybe there are shortcuts through some hyper-dimensions, that would make everything easier.

[W1zzard]

Originally Posted by hat

The way I always thought it worked was that empty space is infinite, and the expanding space is objects drifting further apart from each other.

current data suggests that the universe is flat, there is a certain amount of measuring error, which could mean that the universe is just really really big, so the local curvature we see is too small to detect it (like the earth looks flat to you).

expanding universe means the space _between_ galaxies expands. objects that are gravitationally bound like our whole galaxy, the atoms of the earth, the atoms in your body, their electrons, do not move apart from each other.

a popular example to illustrate expanding universe is a balloon with dots painted on it (galaxies), and the balloon gets inflated, so the space between all points expands. a more accurate representation would be to glue some colored paper dots on it (so those won't expand)

[Completely Bonkers]

God made the universe a Möbius strip just to fuck with us.

[Drone]

There's a lot of other stuff which is more mind-fucking than Mobius strip lol. Hypertorus for example ...

[Ahhzz]

Personally, I think someone glued glitter to the lens on the 'scope.....

[Drone]

Originally Posted by Ahhzz

Personally, I think someone glued glitter to the lens on the 'scope.....

Lol yes it looks like that. It's amazing that light from so many stars and galaxies had made such a long way through space and time to reach us. A lot of things changed since that time, many new galaxy clusters have formed and they all create gravitational lensing to distort and to increase that distant light. Here's more news:

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found a puzzling arc of light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away. The galactic grouping, discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, was observed as it existed when the universe was roughly a quarter of its current age of 13.7 billion years. These images show an arc of blue light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away.

It's no wonder the image is so fuzzy and distorted, it's so darn far away.

The surprise in this Hubble observation is spotting a galaxy lensed by an extremely distant cluster IDCS J1426.5+3508. This cluster is the most massive found at that epoch, weighing as much as 500 trillion suns. It is 5 to 10 times larger than other clusters found at such an early time in the history of the universe. This unique system constitutes the most distant cluster known to "host" a giant gravitationally lensed arc.

What an amazing discovery!

http://phys.org/news/2012-06-rare-ca...l-lensing.html

Finding this ancient gravitational arc may yield insight into how, during the first moments after the Big Bang, conditions were set up for the growth of hefty clusters in the early universe. An analysis of the arc revealed that the lensed object is a star-forming galaxy that existed 10 billion to 13 billion years ago.

[bostonbuddy]

so these would be first generation stars?

[de.das.dude]

Originally Posted by Drone

less than 1 billion years younger than Big Bang.

so if we just had 13.7 billion light years away, we could ave seen the big bang?

[RejZoR]

Theoretically, this could mean that if there are any intelligent creatures, they are probably on these distant galaxies since they were formed looooong before our galaxy did. Plenty of time to evolve.
Hell, it is even possible that there were civilizations that are already gone before even humans started walking the Earth. Who knows.

[Drone]

Originally Posted by de.das.dude

so if we just had 13.7 billion light years away, we could ave seen the big bang?

Interesting question. Maybe the Big Bang can be seen from those distant clusters. In that case those alien astronomers indeed have more information than we can ever imagine.

[W1zzard]

Originally Posted by Drone

Interesting question. Maybe the Big Bang can be seen from those distant clusters. In that case those alien astronomers indeed have more information than we can ever imagine.

until about 300,000 years after the big bang, the whole universe was filled with plasma.
plasma is opaque to electromagnetic radiation = light can not travel through it


the cosmic microwave background that we see today is the first light that could move freely through the universe, and has reached us just now. due to the expansion of the universe its wavelength has been shifted down to microwave frequencies.

in theory it could be possible to observe something earlier using neutrinos, for which plasma is transparent. but it's incredibly hard to record neutrinos.

---

the aliens will "see" a sphere of same size as we do, but with the center around their own planet. the big bang happened everywhere at the same time, so there is no place where you could be, to be closer to it, to observe it any better

[Ahhzz]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

.....

the aliens will "see" a sphere of same size as we do, but with the center around their own planet. the big bang happened everywhere at the same time, ....

Blasphemers!!!!

[Drone]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

the aliens will "see" a sphere of same size as we do, but with the center around their own planet. the big bang happened everywhere at the same time, so there is no place where you could be, to be closer to it, to observe it any better

And what if aliens managed to achieve superluminal velocity and broke through that "300 000-years-after-the-big-bang" horizon?

[W1zzard]

Originally Posted by Drone

And what if aliens managed to achieve superluminal velocity and broke through that "300 000-years-after-the-big-bang" horizon?

i dont think it makes any difference for that. if they can travel ftl, that doesnt make light from the big bang travel faster. it also doesnt change the property of plasma (in the past).

maybe Q could go back to the beginning of time and change the physical properties of stuff

[Drone]

I didn't talk about light. They could travel towards primordial light
What's q?

[W1zzard]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(Star_Trek)

we are actually moving towards cmb as the original, uncleaned up data from wmap shows:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050508.html

it doesn't change anything in teh data, its just added red/blue shift. to get to the image i posted earlier, scientists did some math to remove such velocities and make the data like it would be if earth was at rest.

---

if they travelled back in time to observe the early universe at their planet's location their presence there would change the (at that time very) uniform density in that region of space, which could cause a black hole to form a few B years later -> no alien planet

maybe that's why there is a cold spot:

[Drone]

Originally Posted by W1zzard

we are actually moving towards cmb as the original, uncleaned up data from wmap shows:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050508.html

WMAP, yes I remember now. Dark flow I guess. Like they say "the motion may be a remnant of the influence of no-longer-visible regions of the universe prior to inflation".