Record-Breaking Galaxy Cluster Found 246
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."
Fascinating! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Fascinating! (Score:4, Funny)
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Nope
19.2 + (not counting expansion of the Universe over 19.6 billion years, my maths don't go that high) :-)
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But there’s more. Because clusters are so big and bright, they can be seen really far away. In space, distance means time; the farther away we see an object, the younger the Universe was when the light left that object. In the case of this newly found cluster, the light we see left it 9.6 billion years ago — making it 400 million light years farther away than the next-most distant cluster ever seen. The U
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The Universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old
and yet we still are looking for the expiration date..
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and yet we still are looking for the expiration date..
I'm just guessing here, but you probably don't need to worry about it ....
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Re:Fascinating! (Score:4, Informative)
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Relativity makes a mess of our sense of "now".
Yes, it can be very confusing [youtube.com].
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The whole thing is a lie from the Devil anyway. (Score:2, Funny)
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Why do you assume that the bubble we know as "the Universe" as we've defined it is the only thing in existence?
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I know first-hand there are a LOT of religious scientists. I don't understand how, but it's true.
There's nothing that really conflicts between spirituality and science. Science is about things we can observe and test. Spirituality is for things beyond which science can be used to understand reality. The "metaphysical" is about things which our physics don't yet understand. Remember, it wasn't that long ago that people thought it was impossible for an invisible force to act upon a solid object. Now we h
Re: Fascinating! (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it pretty hard to believe that we are that close to reaching the 'edge' of the universe. What will these materialists do when we discover a galaxy that is further away in light years than the universe is old?
As other have hinted (but not spelled out), you are trying to think out an einsteinean universe in euclidean terms. Since space itself is expanding, the euclidean numbers aren't expected to add up "right".
Either they will have to adjust the value for the age of the universe (as they normally do) or they will have to accept that the current method for determining age is flawed (i.e., that the universe appears older than it actually is).
I don't know about materialists, but scientists will go wherever the evidence leads.
Sometimes kicking and screaming, as in the case of continental drift, but the evidence always wins in the end.
It is certain that we're still wrong about some things -- probably a lot of things. But you can't take too much
Re:Fascinating! (Score:5, Interesting)
Current models suggest that the initial inflationary period of the univerise after the big bang was well in excess of the speed of light. WAY in excess actually.
Yes, this implies that there may be galaxies further away than we can see, outside of our horizon of cause or effect. Heady stuff.
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Yes, this implies that there may be galaxies further away than we can see, outside of our horizon of cause or effect. Heady stuff.
More like headache stuff, as in "Ow! Thinking about that makes my head hurt!
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I know that current models show that the brief moments after the BB (relatively speaking), that they had the universe expanding at FTL speeds. But I never understood how on the one hand, Physicists says that nothing can go FTL, and then say the first bit of time after the BB, things were going FTL.
However, there is an interesting theory [fsteiger.com] that suggests that the speed of light is not a constant at all, but has been slowly degrading over the years.
Which actually fits the BB model much better than those who cl
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The finite speed of light 186,282.3mps is only a constant in our universe and since we are talking about the expansion of the universe it's (our universe) expanding boundaries lie outside it's influence and may have taken place before the formation of space/time itself.
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It implies they're made of the stuff that moved faster than the light did, and what's in our universe is the stuff that didn't.
Which implies that our universe is made of stuff that can be moved by entrainment with the passage of the stuff that moved faster than light.
More fundamentally, it implies that what we think of as "universe" is "that which is made of the stuff that moves at or slower than the speed of light".
Which at this point includes the dark matter, which is dark because it's made of stuff that
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We're pretty sure now that the universe isn't smaller in "diameter" than the age of the universe, thanks to detailed studies of the cosmic microwave background radiation - we would expect to see the same images both close and at a distance if light were "looping", and we're not seeing that.
There's not much to go on for the physics of the actual size of the universe; it's the size of the observable universe that gets discussed. We can see things over 45 billion light years away (by current theories of how t
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how much older are you looking for?
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So... is AC looking for pictures of younger universes (pervert!) or is just into older universes (weirdo!)?
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it IS mind-smashing (Score:5, Funny)
i tried to consider what 9.6 billion light years was like in terms of distance. i mean, really, really tried to get a mental grasp on that scale of size
and i couldn't do it, and now there's a trickle of blood leading out of my nose
thanks a lot, slashdot
i'll just go back to the simply mind-bending effort of trying to imagine the amount of indexed pages in google in terms of library of congress units
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What I always think when I read these kinds of number is: but it's probably not there anymore.
I mean it took billion years for that light to get here, but who knows what could have happend in the meantime. I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't exist anymore or was 'way over there' instead of where 'we' have last seen it.
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To the best of my knowledge, the only thing that's really going to change the general makeup of a galaxy is coliding with another galaxy.
Even give or take a few hundred thousand supernovas that seed the galaxy with heavier elements, It's still going to look pretty similar to us from this distance (assuming we were capable of looking at it at different periods in time, which we can not really do). The dense parts are still going to be dense. the sparse parts are still going to be sparse, etc.
Unless of course
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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.
Putting it in Star Trek terms... (Score:5, Interesting)
If I did my maths right (and that's always doubtful), it's 3.14(+/-) million years away at warp 9.9.
You might want to pack some extra snacks for that trip.
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Pi! Hmmm, there's probably some mathematically mystical explanation for that.
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it IS mind-smashing
My first thought:
Not surprising for those grumpy old people still thinking in naked arrays.
Sorry, I'll show myself out.
Just relax (Score:2)
and try to visualize the sound of one hand clapping. Or with the clap. Or something like that.
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Not that hard to conceptualize - it's about 10% of Everything (if the current numbers for the Observable Universe are to be believed).
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now there's a trickle of blood leading out of my nose
So you tried, couldn't do it, and went to watch something more instantly gratifying like porn?
How is this distance measured? (Score:4, Interesting)
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In theory, it could be any distance. In application, I have no idea how accurate our technolgy is.
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.
Clusters? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Clusters? (Score:2)
Do these clusters sometimes merge together to give birth to entirely new galaxies, and if so, what would that merging process be called?
Clusterbation?
Re:Clusters? (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Intriguing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pushing galaxy formation earlier isn't merely a case of getting a more obscene number. It's giving the models we use to analyze galaxies a serious work-out. Same with spotting ever-earlier stars. In the case of stars, we're pushing the limits of what existing models permit for star formation. If we go much further back there, then the models have an error. Which is good. Science gets booooring when the models are correct and everything matches predictions. Adventure, Excitement and Really Wild Things are only possible when the old models fail and have to either be re-tuned or replaced.
(This is why the failure to detect Dark Matter was so important. Dark Matter is absolutely mandatory for certain models to predict correctly how the universe works. Failure in science is not a bad thing, it is an extraordinarily GOOD thing, as it requires people to revisit past assumptions and past data, to see why the discrepancy exists. It also requires scientists to develop new ideas of what to look for. Some things, we don't know what scale we should be looking at. The Higg's Boson is an example. We've a good idea the LHC will see evidence of it, provided all the numbers are right, but we can't be sure. Gravity waves are tougher - we really should be seeing those by now but aren't. However, all modern gravity wave detectors are merely oversized Michelson-Morley experiments, which Einstein demonstrated could never observe the theorized medium of the ether, no matter how accurate they were. It is therefore possible that gravity waves aren't detectable because the experiments are the wrong ones. It is also possible that they aren't detectable because they aren't there. What isn't possible is for both theory and experiment to be correct.
The ideal in science is to find things that break the current model, but not by too much. Just enough to do interesting work, but not enough that they have to dodge apples falling upwards.
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Totally. Dark matter, dark energy, relativistic gravity, the big bang, and an expanding universe are all theories which are increasingly in conflict with the empirical evidence. Seems like a good time to set the problematic theories aside and try interpreting the data without use of unsupported presumptions.
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What a curious response. The Big Bang is entirely in compliance with empirical observation. The only issue left to be resolved is whether it originated as a singularity, the result of two membranes colliding, or the result of a Big Crunch in imaginary time (a proposal by Professor Hawking a while back).
Relativistic gravity is a problem only in that it is IMPOSSIBLE for both relativistic gravity and QM gravity to be correct. Whichever one is right will automatically make the other wrong, and superstring theo
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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 a
That's a coincidence... (Score:2, Funny)
The aliens that inhabit SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510 recently discovered the Milky Way, and decided to call it SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510. This is going to get confusing.
Re:That's a coincidence... (Score:4, Funny)
luckily they called it SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510 in their own, alien, langugage, which means that when we first encounter them, we'll just pick something that sounds vaguely, but not really all that close, to what they're saying.
Like, say, Peking.
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BUT in an even greater coincidence, they came up with a nearly identical Unicode scheme, and are equally lazy about actually specifying which encoding they are using.
My mind was smashed as soon as I read (Score:3, Funny)
Subaru Telescope (Score:2)
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I wonder if it can be modded to drift..
We* prefer to think of it as "slewing."
*Subaru telescope operator, but wasn't working those nights - just got checked out on MOIRCS last month.
collapse at any minute? (Score:2)
If we're looking at the light source from something that was emitted 9 billion light years ago, how do we know the universe is still expanding? Isn't it possible the universe quit expanding and has been shrinking for the last few billion years? Would we even know about it if it was shrinking at the speed of light? What abou... [no carrier]
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You'd see a blue shift even if the universe was collapsing at the speed of light?
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but if you're seeing red shift on stuff that took 9 billion years to reach you, isn't it possible for the universe to have expanded for 8 billion years, then now it's collapsing at the speed of light - and you wouldn't have any way of telling it's reversed course?
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And what force, pray tell, caused a galaxy moving away from us to stop, then start moving towards us at the speed of light?
Keep in mind that the answer isn't "gravity", because A) unless they started out going 8 times the speed of light, there's no way gravity slowed them to nothing over 8 billion years, then turned them around and sped up to light speed over just 1 billion years, and B) because closer galaxies aren't moving towards us, even though we are apparently a huge gravity well.
If you say "a new unk
Toyota (Score:2, Offtopic)
Just be glad they didn't use the Toyota telescope otherwise it would still be going...
Nah it is not that far away. (Score:2)
Re:Which begs the question: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Which begs the question: (Score:5, Funny)
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Hear here!
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and the kettle calls the pot!
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No it isn't. It's a proxinym.
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I ask your pardon?
Sounds fucking retarded, doesn't it?
Charles Dickens is Retarded [google.com]
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Actually, it has one meaning, but it's arcane, so almost everyone mistakes the other meaning as being its meaning.
Re:Ob (Score:4, Informative)
9.6 billion light years = 2.94330797 × 10^9 Parsecs [google.no]
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But what is that in Libraries of Congress?
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Wrong units. To convert to distance, it would need to be Library of Congresses per Punch-Tape Spool.
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I would actually prefer conversion to Library of Congress widths, lengths, and/or heights. I will also accept longest diagonal dimension for the minimum number of LoCs to reach this cluster.
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The LoC alters in its dimensions according to temperature, making it a difficult unit to use unless it is defined for standard temperature and pressure.
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Well, of course we define it for STP. You know, for the sake of clarity and relevence.
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STP for Triton, naturally.
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no, that's density.
he wants LoC pages end to end.
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I'd rather see that in U.S. Interstate Miles.
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Interesting.. According to Bing [bing.com] it's 2.9433732 x 10^9 Parsecs. I wonder what the cause for the variance is.
Here's a quick rundown of various sites that I would use for reference. .306601 parsecs .306601393805 parsecs
Google [google.com]: 1 light years = 0.30659458 Parsecs
Bing [bing.com]: 1 Light year = 0.30660137 Parsecs
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: 1 parsec = 3.26156 light years
1 light year =
Wolfram Alpha [wolframalpha.com]: 1 light year =
Since Bing uses Wolfram Alpha, I figured they'd match
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How many Kessel Runs is that?
Re:Ob (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always been fascinated by the notion that the parsec is somehow a more universal measurement than the light-year.
Both are based on Earth's orbit, after all.
The light year uses the period.
The parsec uses the diameter, coupled with the purely arbitrary base 60 conventions of the ancient Babylonians .
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How many parsecs is that? Er, wait ... [head asplode]
More important still, how many beard seconds is that [google.ca]?
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1.81642145 × 1034 beard seconds
Um yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
A bunch of galaxies in an image != galaxy cluster.
But hey, links to the Hubble UDF are always enjoyed. :)
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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.
-1, Pedant [Re:Um yeah] (Score:2, Insightful)
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Where there does it say that they found a "galaxy cluster" in that set of data?
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AFAIK, the HUDF does not image any clusters. If it does, your PhD may be ready...
-l
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Sounds like (Academic) Publisher's Clearinghouse:
You may have already won a PhD!
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You, sir, are an idiot*.
*unless you know of a way for matter, or indeed light, to travel faster than light.
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Well problem 1 with that is the fact that the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, and thus looking at a galaxy that is 9.6 billion years ago we can't see anything that would have formed in the last 4.5 bilion years.
Problem 2 is that you are proposing that the universe (in this case space) is finite, but has no boundries... and wraps around on itself. While you are not the first to propose this theory, to the best of my knowledge we currently have no evidence that this may be the case, nor any mathmatical m
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The mathematical model is General Relativity, which postulates that gravity warps the universe back upon itself like the surface of a 4 dimensional sphere. So you could fly off into space and arrive at the same point 14 billion years later from the other direction, or a bit later if you weren't traveling at light speed ;-)
Personally I think it's a bit silly, but that puts me way out of line with mainstream cosmology.
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Can you point me to some papers on this? To my knowledge general realativity breaks down on what the "edge of the galaxy" looks like, and you needed quantum mechanics and "imaginary time" to start begining to explain it.
Either that or Stephen Hawking's explanation of this topic was above my head, which is possible.
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The universe is about 13.75 billion years old.
The sun is about 4.57 billion years old
The earth, about 4.55 billion years.