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posted by janrinok on Sunday September 06 2015, @07:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-a-long-way... dept.

A team of Caltech researchers that has spent years searching for the earliest objects in the universe now reports the detection of what may be the most distant galaxy ever found. In an article published August 28, 2015 in Astrophysical Journal Letters, Adi Zitrin, a NASA Hubble postdoctoral scholar in astronomy, and Richard Ellis—who recently retired after 15 years on the Caltech faculty and is now a professor of astrophysics at University College, London—describe evidence for a galaxy called EGS8p7 that is more than 13.2 billion years old. The universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old.

[...] "The surprising aspect about the present discovery is that we have detected this Lyman-alpha line in an apparently faint galaxy at a redshift of 8.68, corresponding to a time when the universe should be full of absorbing hydrogen clouds," Ellis says. Prior to their discovery, the farthest detected galaxy had a redshift of 7.73.

One possible reason the object may be visible despite the hydrogen-absorbing clouds, the researchers say, is that hydrogen reionization did not occur in a uniform manner. "Evidence from several observations indicate that the reionization process probably is patchy," Zitrin says. "Some objects are so bright that they form a bubble of ionized hydrogen. But the process is not coherent in all directions."

"The galaxy we have observed, EGS8p7, which is unusually luminous, may be powered by a population of unusually hot stars, and it may have special properties that enabled it to create a large bubble of ionized hydrogen much earlier than is possible for more typical galaxies at these times," says Sirio Belli, a Caltech graduate student who worked on the project.

"We are currently calculating more thoroughly the exact chances of finding this galaxy and seeing this emission from it, and to understand whether we need to revise the timeline of the reionization, which is one of the major key questions to answer in our understanding of the evolution of the universe," Zitrin says.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Monday September 07 2015, @02:24AM

    by anubi (2828) on Monday September 07 2015, @02:24AM (#233114) Journal

    Instead of modding your reply, I will comment.

    Its my hope that this forum remain a place where anyone can run something up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes or offers a cogent response of why some concept is not workable.

    Neither was offered.

    This subject is rife with belief, as ( to the best of my observations anyway ) nobody can demonstrate the solution and there are many camps of belief. Some theological ( which seem to me to be bred more of superstition than observation ) and some from extrapolation of observed behaviour of physics ( which I tend to place a lot more credibility to ).

    One thing does strike me though, I feel that in this arena, I feel as a kitten just discovering its way out of the box momma-cat put them in. I have barely seen what I can see in the dining room from the box, much less everything outside. The astronomers through history have tried their damndest to see how big our playpen is, and every time we develop new observation technologies, our playpen's volume goes up by orders of magnitude. I do not see this trend ending anytime soon.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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