Astronomers Discover Ancient ‘Ultra-Red’ Galaxies
http://www.dearastronomer.com/
Concept artwork portraying four extremely red galaxies nearly 13 billion light-years from Earth.
Image Credit: David A. Aguilar
A team of astronomers, led by Jiasheng Huang (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) using the Spitzer Space Telescope, have discovered four ‘Ultra-Red’ galaxies that formed when our Universe was about a billion years old. Huang and his team used several computer models in an attempt to understand why these galaxies appear so red, stating, “We’ve had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations.”
The results of Huang’s research were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal
Using the Spitzer Space Telescope helped make the discovery possible, as it is more sensitive to infrared light than other space telescopes such as the Hubble. The newly discovered galaxies are sixty times brighter in the infrared than they are at the longest/reddest wavelengths HST can detect.
What processes are at work to create these extremely red objects, and why are they of interest to astronomers?
Read the full article over at Universe Today
Ray Sanders is a Sci-Fi geek, astronomer and blogger. Currently researching variable stars at Arizona State University, he writes for Universe Today, The Planetary Society blog, and his own blog, Dear Astronomer
2012-12-04 08:06:59
Source: http://www.dearastronomer.com/2011/12/02/astronomers-discover-ancient-ultra-red-galaxies/
Source:
