Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Refirbed Hubble finds oldest galaxies ever....


From Wired I am reading about some of the new astronomical science being done with the newly upgraded HST.

From the article:
  • (Using the Hubble Space Telescope) astronomers have identified three galaxies (formed) only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. The faint galaxies may be the most distant starlit bodies known, each lying some 13.2 billion light-years from Earth.
  • If the researchers are correct ..... then Hubble is seeing light that reveals the galaxies as they first appeared just 480 million years after the birth of the universe....
As the universe continues to expand, galaxies at the farthest edge have their light shifted to the red end of the spectrum. Again, from the article:
  • In September, two teams ... reported finding galaxies with redshift values of seven to eight, corresponding to an era about 700 million years after the Big Bang. Now, the researchers estimate that another three galaxies imaged by the camera have a redshift of about 10, which if confirmed would be the largest redshift ever measured.
Wired article Tim Sayell sends in a link to the yahoo article

Photo AP/NASA

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