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Early Galaxy Found from the Cosmic ‘Dark Ages’
In the big image at left, the many galaxies of a massive cluster called MACS J1149+2223 dominate the scene. Gravitational lensing by the giant cluster brightened the light from the newfound galaxy, known as MACS 1149-JD, some 15 times. At upper right, a partial zoom-in shows MACS 1149-JD in more detail, and a deeper zoom appears to the lower right. Image credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/JHU
Take a close look at the pixelated red spot on the lower right portion of the image above, as it might be the oldest thing humanity has ever seen. This is a galaxy from the very early days of the Universe, and the light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. The telescopes — and the astronomers using them — had a little help from a gravitational lens effect to be able to see such a faint and distant object, which was shining way back when our Universe was just 500 million years old.
“This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” said Wei Zheng, a principal research scientist in the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who is lead author of a new paper appearing in Nature. “Future work involving this galaxy, as well as others like it that we hope to find, will allow us to study the universe’s earliest objects and how the dark ages ended.”
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Read the rest of Early Galaxy Found from the Cosmic ‘Dark Ages’ (522 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | 13 comments |
Post tags: galaxies, Gravitational Lensing, Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope
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2012-09-20 15:48:35
Source: http://www.universetoday.com/97456/early-galaxy-found-from-the-cosmic-dark-ages/
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