Astronomers Find Stars 7 Billion Light Years Away

StArSkY writes "The Age has an article about an international team of astronomers that has discovered 14 galaxies, opening up a new era of 'galaxy hunting'. Using an infrared instrument in Chile (the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope ) — the researchers have been able to look through the glare of 20 Quasar's to identify previously obscured galaxies. 'Light from the newly found galaxies comes from the time the universe was about 6 billion years old, less than half its current age. By studying the light, the researchers have determined they are starburst galaxies that form lots of new stars -- the equivalent of 20 suns a year. Dr Murphy, who began working on the project while a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, described the results as a great leap forward. The findings have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. '"

Title is misleading

[scarpa]

The point of the article is not that the galaxies were 7 billion light years away, there have been galaxies observed over 10 billion light years from us.

The real story is that these galaxies were in front of quasars and the infrared technique has now allowed observation of them.

Re:Defining Distance with Time

[QuantumTheologian]

You forget that the universe is expanding, and there's no such thing as universal simultaneity.

Re:Expansionary galaxies?

[QuantumTheologian]

According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starburst_galaxy [wikipedia.org], starburst galaxies generally require a large amount of gas (in order to form all the new stars) and are triggered frequently by close encounters with other galaxies. It really seems unlikely that enough matter could be generated from pair production (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production [wikipedia.org]) to create stars, if that's what you're talking about. Perhaps you have it confused with pair instability supernovae http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_instability_supernova [wikipedia.org]?

Re:Defining Distance with Time

[QuantumTheologian]

They're actually hiding in front of quasars:

The galaxies, which are about 7 billion light years from Earth, have until now been difficult to detect, because they lie in front of bright, distant objects known as quasars.

Re:Bending of light

[QuantumTheologian]

The galaxies are in front of the quasars.

The galaxies, which are about 7 billion light years from Earth, have until now been difficult to detect, because they lie in front of bright, distant objects known as quasars.

What made them tough to see was that the quasars were so bright, that they drowned out the signal of these galaxies. The thing that's interesting about this finding is that they were able to use observations in the infrared range to differentiate the signal of the galaxies from the background of the quasars.

born this early in humanity's history.

[RationalRoot]

Have you considered that you may be born at the very end of humanities history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock [wikipedia.org]

Re:Universe ever expanding and recreating?

[pedestrian crossing]

Has anyone ever considered the theory that the universe is not only ever expanding but also ever recreating in the middle? Also shouldn't we be able to tell where the middle of the universe is by obsering in which direction we can see the farthest?

There is no "center" of the universe. You're probably confused by the popular image of the big bang that shows a point of light in the vast darkness that explodes into the universe.

But there is no "vast darkness" outside the universe, by definition the universe is everything. There is no "outside the universe" (of course that makes it hard to do an animation of the big bang on TV).

Every point in the universe is the "center". It's just that the "center" has smeared out across the whole universe as it has expanded from the big bang. On a large scale, everything is moving away from everything else.

Re:Universe ever expanding and recreating?

[kwikrick]

Here's an analogy I always like to clarify how the universe expands.

Imagine that the universe is like the rubber surface of a balloon. Note that we only consider the actual space ON surface to be the universe. Now as the balloon balloon expands, the distance between any two points on the surface increases. But there is no center of the universe, i.e. no reference point ON the surface of the balloon that is special in any way. Of course, the surface of the balloon is a 2D space, and our universe is at least 3 dimensional, or perhaps 11 dimensional, according to some theories. And to describe our expanding balloon, we also needed to imagine an extra dimension... uh oh, sorry, now I'm making things complicated again. Anyway, I hope you get the picture.

Re:Universe ever expanding and recreating?

[Jugalator]

Yeah, that's a popular analogy.

Then some use to say "but you can go INWARDS into the balloon, to its center", but since an expanded balloon is like an expanded universe, that analogy would be to going back in time. And since space and time is most definitely intertwined in the universe, that would also require going back in space. So while you can go back into the center of that balloon alright, what you would end up with would just be the (supposed, maybe not on a quantum mechanical level) singularity of the big bang.

I'm not sure if that way of thinking is entirely correct since I'm just an amateur though, but I think it suits the analogy pretty well.