Record-Breaking Galaxy Cluster Found 246
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the deeper-field dept.
from the deeper-field dept.
The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers are reporting that they have detected the most distant cluster of galaxies ever seen: a mind-smashing 9.6 billion light years away, 400 million light years more distant than the previous record holder. The cluster, handily named SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510, was seen in infrared images by the giant Subaru telescope, and confirmed with spectroscopy and the X-ray detection of million-degree gas (a smoking gun of clusters). Every time astronomers push back the record for clusters, they learn more about the early conditions of the universe, so this cluster will provide insight into how the universe itself changed over the first few billion years after the Big Bang."
Re:Which begs the question: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ob (Score:4, Informative)
9.6 billion light years = 2.94330797 × 10^9 Parsecs [google.no]
Re:How is this distance measured? (Score:1, Informative)
Re: How is this distance measured? (Score:5, Informative)
How far apart do your measuring points need to be to accurately triangulate the position of something 9.6 billion light years away?
It's probably measured by its red shift. The red shift can be calibrated by standard candles such as Cephid variables. The nearest of those are calibrated by parallax, or "triangulation" as you call it.
Wikipedia has an article on the extragalactic distance scale [wikipedia.org], which may interest you.
Re:Um yeah (Score:4, Informative)
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
Re:Clusters? (Score:2, Informative)
Either people are avoiding the obvious or maybe it's not so obvious ...
It would be called a cluster f*ck.
Sorry - after "clusterbation" and "galaxy bang" ... I had to jump in to prevent any further tangents.
Re:it IS mind-smashing (Score:3, Informative)
I mean it took billion years for that light to get here, but who knows what could have happend in the meantime.
Given a known mass, we can predict how long a star will burn. A star with a mass roughly that of the sun will burn for about 10 billion years [astronomynotes.com]. So any young suns in this cluster will have burned out by now. Anything less massive will burn more slowly, and anything more massive will burn much faster.
Re:Fascinating! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Fascinating! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Seems a bit too far, actually (Score:3, Informative)
The understanding of how exactly special and general relativity act in apparent FTL will be left as an exercise reader, as the author does not understand those theories and thus cannot explain them to you.
Re:Seems a bit too far, actually (Score:3, Informative)
Any galaxy with a redshift of around 1.4 is moving away from us faster than the speed of light (the redshift is caused itself by the expansion of space between the time the light was emitted to when it hits us) since the velocity that any galaxy is moving away from the earth is proportional to its distance from us.
Re:Intriguing. (Score:3, Informative)
The claim was the Big Bang didn't fit empirical observation, not that it was illogical. This argument is different. Still easily rejected, but different.
Let us start with something from nothing. The Big Bang says nothing about starting from nothing. Indeed, it says nothing about T=0, let alone before. Whatever "before" means when time isn't present.
Now let us consider what the physicists actually say about the origin of energy (there was no matter prior to Universal Inflation, and indeed not for some time after).
What is stated is that there are a wide range of possibilities, including a foam multiverse, colliding membranes or even a freak quantum foam event. Regardless, you only need a high enough energy density. After that, Inflation and Hawking Radiation is sufficient to account for everything else.
This was mostly old news when I learned about cosmology. That was about 1980, when I was 11. May have been a year earlier. Your education must really suck.