NASA Telescopes Uncover Early Construction of Giant Galaxy

littlesparkvt (2707383) writes "Astronomers have uncovered for the first time the earliest stages of a massive galaxy forming in the young Universe. The discovery was made possible through combining observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, ESA's Herschel Space Observatory, and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The growing galaxy core is blazing with the light of millions of newborn stars that are forming at a ferocious rate. The paper appears in the journal Nature on 27 August." (Here's the NASA press release.)

Construction? So you are telling me there is a god

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew it!

Re:Construction? So you are telling me there is a

[Tablizer]

No, that's a "microscope", son.

Re:

[Tablizer]

The orange cones gave it a way...unless they evolved from dunce-caps or something.

Re:

[Tablizer]

Yes, there is a dog. (They used a reflector scope, it makes a mirror image.)

Re:

[ThaumaTechnician]

Naw, it's just a Magrathean project to kick-start the still sluggish economy.

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[Le Marteau]

Not all of us believe "God" is anthropomorphic. Some of us (e.g. Einstein, who is considered a pantheist) have more expansive definitions.

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[Anonymous Coward]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

Where's the pics?

[Cytotoxic]

You gotta love science infotainment.

The discovery was made possible through combining observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, ESA's Herschel Space Observatory, and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

All of those great imaging systems, but we don't get to see any of the images used? Instead we are given an artist's rendition of a galaxy core forming as the lead image. But where's this extreme redshift galaxy?

For those who care to see something real, NASA did include an image of GOODS-N-744 with labels [slashdot.org] so you could see the fuzzy spot for yourself. I guess you have to wait for the article to be published to see the data from Spitzer and Herschel.

Better article, paper and pictures

[xded]

Here's a better article [spacetelescope.org] from ESA which also links to the arXiv copy [arxiv.org] of the paper and an actual image [spacetelescope.org] of the galaxy (full size JPEG [spacetelescope.org]). (The image at the beginning of TFA is just an illustration, by the way.)

How fast do stars form?

[canadiannomad]

The growing galaxy core is blazing with the light of millions of newborn stars that are forming at a ferocious rate.

In TFA it states that

GOODS-N-774 is producing 300 stars per year. “By comparison, the Milky Way produces thirty times fewer than this — roughly ten stars per year,”

I'm sure I could find it somewhere, or it is really an unanswerable question, but how fast do stars themselves generally form?

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[canadiannomad]

So when they say it is producing 300 stars per year, they are really saying that they are/have been observing about 300 stars completing that process?
How fine is that line between being "almost a star" and actually being a star? Is there a flash point?