{"id":24012,"date":"2016-03-04T09:03:43","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T17:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/astronomers-spot-record-distant-galaxy\/"},"modified":"2016-03-04T09:03:43","modified_gmt":"2016-03-04T17:03:43","slug":"astronomers-spot-record-distant-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/astronomers-spot-record-distant-galaxy\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers spot record distant galaxy"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014<\/strong> Astronomers say they have discovered a hot, star-popping galaxy that is far, far away \u2014 farther than any previously detected, from a time when the universe was a mere toddler of about 400 million years old.<\/p>\n

By employing a different technique \u2014 one that has raised some skepticism \u2014 a team of astronomers exposed a time period they\u2019d thought was impossible to observe with today\u2019s technology. They used the Hubble Space Telescope and found the light wave signature of an extremely bright galaxy 13.4 billion light-years away, according to a study published Thursday by Astrophysical Journal. The margin of error is plus or minus 5 million light-years. A light-year is about 5.8 trillion miles.<\/p>\n

It shatters old records for distance and time in a big way, and may remain the farthest that can be seen for years, until a new space telescope is launched, the team of astronomers said.<\/p>\n

With that light signature, astronomers were able to produce a photo of this galaxy that\u2019s fuzzy and all-too deceptive in color. It appears darkish red and indistinct, when in reality it\u2019s so hot it is bright blue, but the light has traveled so long and far that it has shifted to the very end of the color spectrum, to dark red. And that fuzziness masks an incredible rate of star formation that\u2019s 10 times more frenetic than our Milky Way, said study co-author Gabriel Brammer, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really is star bursting,\u201d Brammer said. \u201cWe\u2019re getting closer and closer to when we think the first stars formed … There\u2019s not a lot of actual time between this galaxy and the Big Bang.\u201d<\/p>\n

If we were back in time and near this galaxy (named GN-z11), we\u2019d see \u201cblue, stunning, really bright young stars\u201d and all around us would be \u201cvery messy looking objects\u201d that are galaxies just forming \u2014 not the large bright spirals we think of as galaxies, said study co-author Garth Illingworth at the University of California Santa Cruz.<\/p>\n

Astronomers measure the distance an object by calculating how much the light changes from blue to red, called redshift. This discovery is of a galaxy with redshift of 11.1; until this discovery, the previous highest redshift was 8.68, about 580 million years after the Big Bang. For a long time, competing teams of astronomers were just trying to reach a redshift of 9, about 550 million years after the Big Bang. But the new discovery blew all that out of the water, surprising the team that found it, said study lead author Pascal Oesch of Yale.<\/p>\n

The way they did it was different than the old methods of using a standard light wave signature marker, with the spectrum measured precisely by ground telescope. Instead, the team looked beyond that bright line to a longer, but messier light wave spectrum, using what\u2019s considered a rougher tool, Illingworth said.<\/p>\n

Competing astronomer Richard Ellis at the European Southern Observatory, who found the previous record far galaxy, was skeptical. He said the light signatures used by Oesch\u2019s teams are \u201cnoisier and harder to interpret\u201d and may overlap with competing nearby stars or galaxies. And for GN-z11 to be that visible it would have to be three times brighter than typical galaxies, he said in an email.<\/p>\n

Oesch said the team made sure \u201cthis was as clean as possible a measurement\u201d with little contamination. He said the technique they used is starting to become standard.<\/p>\n

But Oesch, Brammer and Illingworth said don\u2019t expect new discoveries farther and older than this one, because they have pushed Hubble to its limit. Only when the next NASA space telescope is launched and operating, probably in 2019, will astronomers see farther.<\/p>\n

Astronomer Dimitar Sasselov at Harvard, who wasn\u2019t part of the research, called the discovery exciting and interesting: \u201cSeeing and understanding the first galaxies and the first stars is an essential part of our origins story.\u201d<\/p>\n

____<\/p>\n

Online:<\/p>\n

Hubble Space Telescope: http:\/\/hubblesite.org\/news\/2016\/07<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Follow Seth Borenstein at http:\/\/twitter.com\/borenbears and his work can be found at http:\/\/bigstory.ap.org\/content\/seth-borenstein<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 Astronomers say they have discovered a hot, star-popping galaxy that is far, far away \u2014 farther than any previously detected, from a time when the universe was a mere toddler of about 400 million years old. By employing a different technique \u2014 one that has raised some skepticism \u2014 a team of astronomers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-24012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24012\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24012"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=24012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}