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Space Science

Powerful Galaxies Found in Infrared 172

Posted by Zonk from the larger-galaxies-could-mean-billions-of-denny's dept.
demachina writes "NASA's Spitzer Infrared space telescope has discovered 'a mysterious population of distant and enormously powerful galaxies radiating in the infrared spectrum with many hundreds of times more power than our Milky Way galaxy.' They are 80% of the way back to the big bang. They found them by comparing a visible and infrared scan of the sky and looking at the places where there was a big infrared signature and no visible one. They are shrouded in dust."
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Powerful Galaxies Found in Infrared More

Powerful Galaxies Found in Infrared

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  • Other life forms are out there... (Score:4, Funny)

    by hhlost ( 757118 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @02:30PM (#11853626)
    and if they're smart, they're hiding from us. fp?

  • so? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When you say "enourmously powerful" what exactly are we talking here? like, weapons? big spaceships? that sort of thing?

  • They're watching (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05, 2005 @02:34PM (#11853660)
    in the constellation Bootes the Herdsman, the IRS team selected and observed 31 that are quite bright in the infrared but invisible in the NOAO survey.

    So you really can't hide from the IRS :(
    • NASA Scientist:

      "Apparently, instead of installing the correct instruments in the Spitzer Infrared space telescope, we accidentally installed a universal TV remote control. Anyone would have mistaken this infrared source as a powerful infrared galaxy as we did. Coincidently this is our second

      instrumentation mistake [slashdot.org] this week.

      However, one of our mission objects was successful. As we now have the capability to force everyone on Earth to watch the NASA TV channel."

  • Is it only me... (Score:3, Informative)

    by born_to_live_forever ( 228372 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @02:35PM (#11853667) Homepage
    ... or is it hilarious to see the pop-up ads that are linked to words like "radio", "satellite" and "software"? Their content is so commercial, and so divorced from relation to the scientific news of the article, that instead of being ads, they become parodies of themselves.
    • pop-up ads?

      Good grief, they still do those?
      Cure Part-1 [mozilla.org] - Cure Part-2 [mozdev.org] - Cure Part-3 [kolla.de]
      • Agreeing with an AC who's post is at 0...

        I too am using Firefox with popups disabled, and the space site still had a popup - this for a supposed spyware remover (possibly a trojan, who knows?). The latest round of popups has gotten past the common blockers.

        Firefox also said that it had blocked popups, so presumably some were stopped, just not that one.

        Frankly, when a minor-league topical news site engages in such tactics, I start to question the veracity of their stories.
        • I didn't see any popups, but I did notice two things: the webpage finished loading with the status bar still indicating that it was "transferring from intellitxt.com", and there were several stupid-links in the text of the article where a mouse-over causes a box to appear there like a tooltip.

        • Well like cdbee said, use adblock. The main offender on that page is fastclick. The javascripts can be blocked with the following regexp:
          /[\W\d](double|fast)click[\W\d]/

    • It is only you. The rest of us don't read the articles...

  • Is Dark Matter just hidden matter? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kraemahz ( 847827 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @02:35PM (#11853672)
    This begs one to ask, if we keep finding these galaxies that are emitting energy but no light, is this dark matter or is it just normal matter that we just haven't been able to find yet? There might be a hell of a lot more dust out there than we thought there was originally.
    • Perhaps they are moving away from us fast enough that they are red-shifted completely out of the visible spectrum. Also, there is much speculation that dark matter is normal matter that is not hot enough to emit light.
    • or, are we looking merely at reflections of the universe at an earlier period of time, bouncing around the vast distances of space, a kind of 'holographic echo' of time?

      sorta, 'earlier reflections of the universe, bouncing around the universe' ..
    • Actually, it's thought that a whole bunch of the energy from the big bang is still...energy. Dark energy. Though we still have no clue.

    • Re:Is Dark Matter just hidden matter? (Score:5, Informative)

      by luna69 ( 529007 ) * on Saturday March 05, 2005 @02:57PM (#11853839)
      Infrared "energy" IS light.

      Electromagnetic radiation takes many forms: radio, microwave, infrared, visual (what we see as "light"), UV, Xrays, gamma rays. They are all "light".

      Sorry to be a pedant.
      • I'm fully aware of that. When I say "light" I mean "visible light," I don't feel the need for the added adjective when we already have such an anthrocentric view of everything. And I think you'd start getting funny looks if you started claiming radio was light. It's EM radiation, leave it at that.

        • Re:Is Dark Matter just hidden matter? (Score:4, Informative)

          by mbrother ( 739193 ) <mbrother.uwyo@edu> on Saturday March 05, 2005 @03:25PM (#11854017) Homepage
          That's because you're not an astronomy professor. Radio waves are light, and no one should give me a funny look about it, especially during lecture. Hammering in a basic point like this helps students remember that radio waves travel at the speed of light (NOT SOUND! Oh I see that a lot), suffer diffraction like other wavelengths of light, etc. Of course, I then make a big point of saying how visible light is just EM radiation.
          • I think one way to break people's misconceptions about the different types of EM radiation (radio, microwave, infrared, visible, uv, xray, gamma) is to explain that the difference is not in the light itself, but in the scale of the things that the light interacts with.

            The reason that they seem so different to us is because their wavelengths are larger/similar to/smaller than various atoms and molecules that we can observe them interacting with, so the net effect can be drastically different. If someone we
        • Referring to radio waves, x-rays, microwaves and any other portion of the EM spectrum as "light" is VERY common in the literature.....

    • Re:Is Dark Matter just hidden matter? (Score:4, Informative)

      by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @03:51PM (#11854148)
      No. The amount of ALL baryonic light emitting (or reflecting) or not is tightly constrained with high confidence by the WMAP result at ~4%. This number may change in the future with more precise CMBE measurements but certainly not by more than mere fractions of a percent.

    • Re:Is Dark Matter just hidden matter? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Bootsy Collins ( 549938 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @03:59PM (#11854197)

      This begs one to ask, if we keep finding these galaxies that are emitting energy but no light, is this dark matter or is it just normal matter that we just haven't been able to find yet? There might be a hell of a lot more dust out there than we thought there was originally.

      Certainly some of the dark matter is in baryonic (i.e. normal) matter. In fact, it's interesting to note that the the first "missing matter" found was baryonic. While the rotation curves of spiral galaxies provide the most clear-cut evidence for missing matter at present, the history of the dark matter problem started much earlier, with Fritz Zwicky's observation that clusters of galaxies had to have a lot of mass not shining in the visible spectrum in order to be bound objects; their galaxies were moving too fast for clusters to be gravitationally bound objects otherwise. Then, starting in the 1960s, a significant fraction of that dark matter was found when it was discovered that the space between galaxies in clusters is filled with a 10-100 million degree gas (well, plasma) known as the intracluster medium or ICM. In very large clusters, the ICM can have several times as much mass as the mass of all the cluster galaxies. That was a good sized chunk of the missing matter on cluster scales, right there.

      However, despite that, it still left most of the apparent mass of galaxy clusters unaccounted-for, a situation that remains today. And that's been the same story with pretty much all the dim or dark baryonic matter we've found since then: it's crucial to know about, since it has important things to tell us about the evolution of the Universe, the history of galaxy formation, etc., but it doesn't make a big impact on the dark matter problem. Our measurements of the compnents of the density of the Universe are at low redshift, and we don't know what the low-redshift counterparts of these high-redshift ultraluminous IR galaxies are. But if they turn out to be something we haven't yet detected, and thus it turns out we've underestimated the number of low-redshift galaxies by a factor of three (very doubtful), that still won't put an appreciable dent in the dark matter problem. There's just so much dark matter out there to find, compared to the amount of known baryonic matter.

      Finally, it's worth noting that if baryonic matter were able to explain away all the dark matter, that would actually pose a serious problem for the standard relativistic hot big bang model. One of the observational lynchpins of the model is its set of predictions for light element abundances. We think we know all the relevant physics at the energies of nuclear processes; that, combined with the evolution of the background Universe as dictated by the Big Bang model, allows one to calculate the abundances of light elements. It turns out that the theory of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis is able to make pretty good predictions for the abundances of hydrogen, helium, lithium, etc., provided the density of the Universe in baryons is within a small range. The predicted values are significantly larger than the contribution to the mass density of the Universe from the luminous matter in galaxies, so we already expected that that there would be some baryonic dark matter. But the predicted values are also much much much smaller than the apparent density of the Universe in dark matter. In other worse, if Big Bang Nucleosynthesis is correct, you expect there to be baryonic dark matter, but you also expect much much more non-baryonic dark matter. Of course, that doesn't mean that all the dark matter isn't baryonic -- nature is under no obligation to follow our theories! -- but the theory's done reasonably well up to know, so it's worth remembering and is a reminder to be careful.

      • A couple of questions

        "observation that clusters of galaxies had to have a lot of mass not shining in the visible spectrum in order to be bound objects"

        What is the problem here? Does an Oort cloud 'shine'? If the interstellar spaces were crowded with planet-sized bodies, would these 'shine'? Can't this 'missing matter' merely be rocky or icy crud between the stars? I've often suspected that interstellar navigation might be *extremely* dangerous due to such obsticals, but wouldn't they count as 'dark matter

        • Re:Is Dark Matter just hidden matter? (Score:5, Informative)

          by mbrother ( 739193 ) <mbrother.uwyo@edu> on Saturday March 05, 2005 @04:44PM (#11854493) Homepage
          I'll just reply to a few of the questions raised.

          The hot intercluster medium IS hot, but temperture is a funny thing in some astronomical settings. In this case, the density of particles is so low, a better vacuum than you'd get in Earth laboratories, that the heat content would be pretty low. You wouldn't get incinerated, for instance. But a conventional thermometer wouldn't work either since it probably wouldn't get into thermodynamic equilibrium. It would radiate away its heat faster than the ambient gas could warm it.

          Astronomers have excellent limits on the amount of normal matter, as the parent poster says. We've got an excellent idea what is out there based on emission in the far infrared, interstellar scintillation, absorption line studies, reddening studies, etc. We have very good limits on the Oort cloud density, too, from comet statistics. There are even a number of direct observations based on microlensing surveys, and there's a shadow survey, too, looking at large star fields. In short, we've got pretty good numbers and we're not going to discover that there's more normal dark baryonic matter out there than we already know about.

          • Ok so if we built a space ship (somehow) and powered off toward the nearest star at high speed, the occupants wouldn't have to worry too much about hitting some unexpected obstacle on the 'road'?
            • That's right. There's just not much stuff out there. The chances would be tiny.

              The one caveat to this concerns the speed of the spaceship. If it approaches relativistic speeds, a pebble can hit like a mountain. In this situation, you'd want to have some kind of active shielding. I describe one such system in my novel Star Dragon, which is out in paperback or available from my website for free download.
          • We have very good limits on the Oort cloud density

            Really? By very good you mean within multiple orders of magnitude - with lots of hand waving. No one can even agree on the method used to perturb comets from the Oort Cloud into visible orbits, so the statistics are more like guesses. We're only working with a sample space of ~50 comets that have been observed and quantified in all of human history, hardly something that you can base sound stats on. As far as I'm aware the current estimates for Oort Cloud
            • You're mistaken about the dearth of comets. We observe well over 50 new comets each YEAR since the era of modern astronomy. For designated comets in the past decade, please see the compilation [aerith.net] for instance.

              The Oort cloud existence is on very solid footing. The numbers I'm aware of are 50-500 Earth masses, and since this is less than 1/1000 of a solar mass spread out over a huge volume, in discrete chunks, we can certainly address the probability of hitting something flying a space ship through it (whic

        • "observation that clusters of galaxies had to have a lot of mass not shining in the visible spectrum in order to be bound objects"

          What is the problem here? Does an Oort cloud 'shine'? If the interstellar spaces were crowded with planet-sized bodies, would these 'shine'? Can't this 'missing matter' merely be rocky or icy crud between the stars? I've often suspected that interstellar navigation might be *extremely* dangerous due to such obsticals, but wouldn't they count as 'dark matter'?

          Certainly rock

          • All I'm wondering is, if you had a space ship out there in the ICM you wouldn't need to worry about it being warmed up by this stuff, right? Just sitting there, minding your own business.

            Its not as if its a cloud of hot, *dangerous*, plasma that is going to mess with your hull plating?

            I'm just trying to understand if this is plasma as in hot glowy stuff that melts through things or not.

            Excuse me, my education on plasma has mostly been Trek.
        • What is the problem here? Does an Oort cloud 'shine'? If the interstellar spaces were crowded with planet-sized bodies, would these 'shine'? Can't this 'missing matter' merely be rocky or icy crud between the stars?

          IANAAP (Not an astrophysacist) but as I understand it, if an object doesn't reflect light then it absorbs it and reradiates the energy at different wavelengths (i.e. you'd be able to see the 'crud' as surely as you would see something reflective, just at different wavelengths).

          Take, for exampl

  • Something i have always wondered (Score:4, Interesting)

    by X0563511 ( 793323 ) * on Saturday March 05, 2005 @02:37PM (#11853682) Homepage Journal
    If all the stars and celestial bodies (galaxies, ect.) are all different distances from us, and are all moving in relation to each other...

    How do we know where they really are? If any EM radiation takes time to get here... Our night sky view is a view of something that has never happened, is not happening now, and will not happen (at least the particular configuration we see). The same thing goes for our radio telescopes, thermal, x-ray, ect.

    That galaxy they found could not even exist now, or it may actually be 180 degrees relative to where we see it now.

    Am i just crazy? Or do we have NO hope of actually figuring out where things are unless we figure out how to use quantum mechanics somehow to do it?
    • Well, If I throw a ball to you your hands will hopefully be in the right place to catch the ball before it arrives.

      That's because Newtons laws [google.com] of gravity and motion are more-or-less perfect for ball catching. Where greater times, distances and speeds are involved Einstein's theory of relativity [google.com] becomes more useful.

      Scientists hedge their bets on those laws and previous observations of stars and galaxies being good enough to estimate where this are now and where they were.

      This could all be in my head and e
    • I am a bit confused by your question but here goes my two cents anyway. Infrared radiation like light is an electromagnetic wave that travel thro' space at the rate of 3 x 10^8 m/s respectively. The condition of the new galaxy that we see now is the 'image' of it some million light years ago, that is the time the radiation took to reach earth. So you may be right to speculate that the galaxy might not exist at all.
      We know where they are by a process called Red-Shift [google.co.in]. Please note that there is nothing cal
    • That galaxy they found could not even exist now, or it may actually be 180 degrees relative to where we see it now.

      The light only moves so fast, and (if|since) the galaxy moves, the only way to find how fast it moves is to look how much the light is distorted, due to the Doppler effect [wikipedia.org].

      For more information, google turned up this [zamandayolculuk.com] page.

    • That's always been an interesting point, Imagine trying to plot an intergalactic course moving at 99%c, I wonder if the math is beyond us. But here's something to really freak you out, there's no way to interpret the world in real-time. Senses such as sight move at c, hearing, at the speed of sound, and touch, at the speed our nerves can fire.
      • The math is actually not beyond us. There have been some very interesting results using ray tracing to simulate what the surroundings would look like if you were to be accelerated to a relativistic speed.

        See here [anu.edu.au] and here [uni-tuebingen.de].

    • Am i just crazy? Or do we have NO hope of actually figuring out where things are unless we figure out how to use quantum mechanics somehow to do it?

      You're not crazy. You just have no hope of actually figuring out much. Don't quit your day job and leave quantum machanics to others.

    • I agree with everyting you say, I just wanted to suggest that if we ever do get a warp drive, that will help things immensely. If we could cross great distances and take measurements from different points of view, we would be able to build a very accurate picture of where things really are at a given time. A key factor would be in being able to dart all around very quickly, so that all data from one point of view is as fresh as possible when being checked against data from a different point of view. Might
      • That would involve going faster then the speed of light which would actually complicate things more then it would simplify them. Aside from trying to give meaning to a measurement of time that is imaginary, you would also have to deal with the possibility of breaking causality. It would just get very ugly and the accepted view of most physicists is that it's just not possible.

  • We must rename the milky way (Score:4, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @02:37PM (#11853683)
    If these are really powerful galaxies then they will think the milky way is a girly sounding name and beat it up. I propose 'the hard as coffin nails' galaxy be adopted.
  • So wait a minute - it says it's found these galaxies in the infared spectrum...

    So what exactly constitutes a galaxy now? I thought a galaxy had to be a collection of stars; which omit visible light?

    • I thought a galaxy had to be a collection of stars; which omit visible light?

      So? These ones are omitting visible light. :)

    • I thought a galaxy had to be a collection of stars; which omit visible light?

      Something tells me that they are already omitting visible light.

      Kids these days. You send them to school, and they just chew on the books.

      • emit; yes, that's my fault. It's early in the.. well, afternoon. :)
        • But I did mean to ask the question above in a serious sense... I thought the definition of a galaxy was nothing more than just a collection of stars held together by gravity?

          So how then can these be called galaxies? Aren't they nothing more than blobs of heat? I read the article, but I don't really understand it. Any actual astonomers out there who can expond for me?

          And sorry 'bout the English.. It's Saturday.
          • There are presumably stars in there, mostly obscured by dust. And likely quasars/actic galactic nuclei. Admittedly, there is speculation here, but educated speculation. What is known is the redshift, the energy flux, which together give us the distance and luminosity. The luminosities are huge -- only galaxies have such huge luminosities. Only massive starbursts or quasars could power these objects. Quasars seem to exist only in the centers of massive galaxies. Ergo, we must have galaxies filled with

    • Re:Large Blobs of Heat? (Score:5, Informative)

      by luna69 ( 529007 ) * on Saturday March 05, 2005 @03:18PM (#11853980)
      IAAA (I am an astronomer).

      All galaxies (with the exception of the recently discovered and dubiously titled "dark matter galaxy" mentioned here a few days ago) emit light at a wide variety of wavelengths, from radio all the way to gamma rays. The wavelengths at which a star emits is related to its temperature (google "blackbody radiation" or "planck spectrum"); other astrophysical processes can produce or modify passing emissions as well (molecular & plasma clouds, various types of "dead" stars like neutron stars, white dwarfs, etc. can create emissions due to non-blackbody radiation - google "bremstrahllung", "cerenkov", "synchrotron", etc.).

      The reason that these particular galaxies are only visible in the infrared is that a) intervening dust reddens emissions across intergalactic (and, for that matter, INTRAgalactic) distances, and b) they are so far away that as the universe has expanded, the light traveling from them has been redshifted - stretched along with the spacetime through which they have been traveling. Thus, what we see as infrared now was originally of much shorter wavelength when it was emitted.

      Hope that's useful, let me know if I can clarify.
      • An astrophysics student, rusty on his astro because he's been focusing on quantum recently, responds:

        If they're just distant galaxies that have been redshifted (/reddened by dust absorption), why do we care?

        Isn't this what's *supposed* to happen? "Apple observed falling, film at 11."

        'Course, they mention that these galaxies are "100 times more powerful" than the Milky Way. Is that 100 times more luminous in the infrared than the Milky Way (which would make sense) or 100 times more luminous in the infrare

        • Re:Large Blobs of Heat? (Score:4, Informative)

          by luna69 ( 529007 ) * on Saturday March 05, 2005 @06:30PM (#11855140)
          > why do we care?

          That's a good question, and worth a better answer than I have time do do here (mbrother?). The short answer is that they're so far away that we're actually seeing galaxies as they were very early in the universe. When we look at nearby galaxies, we only see galaxies as they exist after billions (current estimates are, if I'm up to date, that galaxy evolution has been going on for around 13Gy) of years of evolution. By looking FAR AWAY, we're also looking BACK IN TIME, and are thus able to see things we'd otherwise have no ability to observe.

          A surprising amount can be gleaned from spectroscopic analysis of faint, red (& ancient) galaxies. What ionization levels are observable? Do we see lots of heavy elements, or none at all? Such observations can also be very powerful probes of the stuff IN BETWEEN here and there. If we can make certain assumptions about the original emissions, then by looking at the OBSERVED emissions, we can infer, to some degree, the conditions in the intervening space (and time) between emitter and collector. There is lots of good work being done in this area currently.

          Hope that helps, let me know if I can clarify!

          • Ah, gotcha.

            That makes sense, and I was thinking myself about some of the interesting tidbits one can glean from seeing a "newborn" galaxy.

            Still, the article pitches the discovery as interesting solely as "OMG INFR4R3D SOURCE WTF BBQ!", which (as you've confirmed) isn't why this is significant.
  • Like a link that subverts Firefox pop-up-blocking powerful? Or just plain old enormously powerful?
    • 1. Galaxies are mammals.

      2. Galaxies fight ALL the time.

      3. The purpose of the Galaxy is to flip out and kill people.

      Check out this site all about galaxies, REAL GALAXIES. This site is awesome.I can't stop thinking about Galaxies. These guys are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet.
      • This is the funniest use of an old, dead and tired webjoke I've seen in a long time. I think that I am going to print it and put it on my office door.

        "...ALL the time..." Heh. Priceless.

  • It's kind of wierd to think (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Saturday March 05, 2005 @02:39PM (#11853692) Homepage Journal
    About how much space we've mapped and yet... no life appears to be out there. The odds would have you thinking otherwise (given an infinite universe) but nothing found.

    Maybe we're just in a particularly lucky section of the Big Bang spew. Or maybe we can't observe light that far away because of gravitational effects on photons. Kind of makes you wonder if it's by design.

    • Don't forget that everything we percieve from space happened a LOOONG time ago. There may very well be life out there, but what we see is part of it's past.

      They may even be transmitting, may have been for a looong time. By the time we recieve the transmission, they (or us) may become extinct.
    • Other life forms are on their way to Earth. It's just taking a really long time. Their damn Yugo spaceships can barely break the speed of light. :-(
    • The space that we have mapped so far are the 'echoes' of the same a long time ago. The galaxies we are seeing now have evolved in the mean time and who knows there might be life on it now.

    • It's out there but we won't see it (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Look at how long it took for intelligent life to arise on this planet, on this solar system, in this galaxy. Who's to say that it necessarily took any less time elsewhere in the universe?

      When we look to the skies we are looking back in time. So even if another civilization 300 hundred light years away developed radio 200 years ago, we won't hear from them for another 100 years. And 300 light years is barely measurable as distance in the grand scheme of things.

      Plus by all indications inter-stellar space
      • Look at how long it took for intelligent life to arise on this planet, on this solar system, in this galaxy. Who's to say that it necessarily took any less time elsewhere in the universe?

        Less time elsewhere? That is meaningless statement. There is no such thing as a simultaneous event. It is not as if some "time" has passed since the events we are "presently" witnessing from a distance, as that implies that time is an absolute, and it isn't.

        Time and space are desperately interwoven, and any attemp
    • We can't see signs of life because their billboards aren't big enough yet: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/0 2/0237205&threshold=1&tid=133&tid=160&tid=14 [slashdot.org]
  • .. welcome our new huge galatic power overlords From The Beginning, and remind them that as a cretinous fleck of a lifeform in a completely insignificant part of the known universe, us humans are good for nothing.
  • has discovered 'a mysterious population of distant and enormously powerful galaxies radiating in the infrared spectrum

    You don't know the meaning of power till you've met my wife.

    Yes, this is a troll.
  • Are we finally reaching the point when we're looking to objects and galaxies so incredibly far away, we're seeing things that only existed in the much younger universe? Surely with something so far away, the light would take ages to reach here.
    • Yes, that's correct. Looking through a powerful telescope is looking back in time, and when we see something that's a billion light-years away, what we see is a billion years old.

      And if anyone in that galaxy a billion light-years away is looking in our directions, perhaps they'll see what I looked like when I had hair.

  • The link in this post just gave me a popunder [slashdot.org] in Safari with pop-up window blocking on.

  • Their paper? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05, 2005 @03:02PM (#11853879)
    Couldn't find a link to the published ApJL paper, but this [arxiv.org] might be the preprint or related to it.
  • red is more powerful. Red Lightsaber, red cobra lasers, the eye of thundera (sp?), Dark Phoenix, Red Hat (vs windows blue). Ketchup tastes better than mustard. sheesh, of course there will be powerful galaxies inferred from red.

  • galaxies full of dyson spheres? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05, 2005 @03:19PM (#11853984)
    a dyson sphere is said to only radiate infrared. wiki [wikipedia.org]
  • my browser happened to render the story so that the first line read

    demachina writes "NASA's Spitzer Infrared space telescope has discovered 'a mysterious population

    .. i almost pissed myself...

  • radiating in the infrared spectrum with many hundreds of times more power than our Milky Way galaxy

    It's God's remote control.

    Chip H.

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  • The article was a bit breathless about what could be a simple normal occurrence. These things are so far away they are just red-shifted out of the visible spectrum.

    Since the universe is expanding, the further an object is away from the observer, the greater its red-shift. Hubble came up with the idea that the visible universe isn't limited by what's visible... It's limited by the velocity-distance proportionality. At some point everything that would be visible has been completely red-shifted out of the visi

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