Hubble telescope shows earliest photo of universe

[n2doc]

(01-05) 15:27 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the earliest image yet of the universe — just 600 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a toddler.

Scientists released the photo Tuesday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. It's the most complete picture of the early universe so far, showing galaxies with stars that are already hundreds of millions of years old, along with the unmistakable primordial signs of the first cluster of stars.

These young galaxies haven't yet formed their familiar spiral or elliptical shapes and are much smaller and quite blue in color. That's mostly because at this stage, they don't contain many heavy metals, said Garth Illingworth, a University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomy professor who was among those releasing the photo.

"We're seeing very small galaxies that are seeds of the great galaxies today," Illingworth said in a news conference.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/01/05/national/a091633S93.DTL

[Faygo Kid]

1. Wow! Amazing. Lots can happen in 6,000 years.

As the FReepers can attest.

[Peace Patriot]

2. Is what looks like oatmeal wallpaper behind the brighter objects what they are talking about

as the very, very distant blue galaxies from 10 to 13 billion yearsago? Are there so many of them? Anybody know?

[Peace Patriot]

4. I've read the whole article and nobody explains what's in the picture,

though the photo at the site has some of the blue dots circled. I still don't understand the density level of these never-before-seen blue dots (the farthest distant galaxies) in this photograph. Do the very distant blue galaxies "fill" all the space between the brighter objects, or are they only occasionally present in the photo?

I'm having a time-space continuum problem, too. (Ha, ha.) Why is the Universe layered like this (an outer "sphere" of these early blue proto-galaxies, and inner (closer to us) the more organized galaxies)? And this is really hard to explain. When you put a cake in the over and bake it, it expands everywhere. All of its bits of flour, sugar, raisins or whatever, transform at the same time--the constituent parts are all changed, as they expand together from the amorphous wet globule into a cake.

So, why does the raw material of the universe--these less formed, less swirly, less structured blue blobs, that are just being seen for the first time--still there? Why didn't they become galaxies as we see closer in?

It's more like an optical illusion problem. Throw in time, and it's really complicated. And maybe this is exactly what the astronomers who are now studying this photo are trying to figure out?

We--the Milky Way and its neighbors in our neck of the woods--were once a blue globule, or maybe several blue globules, that coalesced, interacted, got hot, formed a spiral (and somehow acquired a black hole in the middle). If the blue globules were the earliest form of matter (yet seen)--the "building blocks of the galaxies"--where's our blue globule (or globules)? Why would the blue globules, out of which the galaxies are created, be "out there"?

When you bake a cake, you don't find a pile of amorphous wet ingredients on the outside of the cake, once it's cooked. It's ALL cooked. Why was this matter--the blue globules--expelled from the "cake"?

Do we really understand what's "young" and what's "old" in the universe? We understand what's far away, and how far away it is. But how do we know how old it is? Maybe our local blue globules got all gobbled up in the formation of the closer galaxies (including our own) and what we are seeing "out there" in this photo are somebody else's blue globules forming a new universe out at the outer edges of our own. They are not "old." They are "young"--just forming.

I understand that we presume that distance is age. But maybe these tiny blue objects don't follow that rule.

Is measuring distance and age from here--from earth--the correct way to measure it?

Wow, this IS difficult to explain and understand. Okay, we are supposedly getting light from these objects that has traveled the universe for 13 billion years (not that long after the Big Bang). So, maybe the question that will solve my difficulty is: What's happening there now? Is it correct to presume that what's happening there now--where the blue dots are--is a whole bunch of structured galaxies, just like here? 13 billion years have gone by, there. And if somebody there was looking through their Hubble telescope at us, right now, what they would see is blue globules.

Correct? Anybody here know more about this than me?

[lazer47]

6. I was really getting interested, then you stopped, you explained more than the article

[Peace Patriot]

9. I'm trying to understand "young" and "old" in the universe.

They say these blue dots are "young"--early universe, 13 billion years ago, light just reaching us now. So they are not "young." They are very, very "old."

Or rather, their light is very, very old. This is old light that is reaching us. So, if 13 billion years have gone by, since this light was generated, a whole lot has been happening "out there" (origin of the blue dots' light) in the meantime. In REALITY--real time--whatever is out there, is NOT "young" any more.

Is it like our neck of the woods NOW? Highly structured, big, mostly spiral galaxies--aggregates of the blue dots? Or is it something else? Some still undeveloped part of a new universe--maybe horizon to a different universe?

And how do they know? Has it developed, or hasn't it? Is the 13 billion years some kind of "optical illusion" ("optical-time illusion")?

[n2doc]

5. Another article with id's

The results are gleaned from the HUDF09 observations, which are deep enough at near-infrared wavelengths to reveal galaxies at redshifts from z=7 to beyond redshift z=8. (The redshift value "z" is a measure of the stretching of the wavelength or "reddening" of starlight due to the expansion of space.) The clear detection of galaxies between z=7 and z=8.5 corresponds to "look-back times" of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago.

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2010/01/05/astronomers.detect.earliest.galaxies

This light is 13 billion years old.

[Peace Patriot]

8. I still have the question: Is the pix highlighting just a few blue proto-galaxies

of many in the pix (the whole background), or are the 7 identified the only ones in that pix?

[StarfarerBill]

3. Sweeeet! K&R

Thanks for posting this. :)

[Gregorian]

7. I took astronomy at UC Santa Cruz back in '74. How nostalgic.

In more than one way.

I wonder what techniques they're using to determine age and whatnot. It's a strange science.