![]() For the six galaxies detected in the new observations to have gotten as big as they did as fast as they did, they’d have had to be forming hundreds of new stars a year for hundreds of millions of years. The Milky Way is thought to give birth to perhaps two new stars every year. For one thing, the galaxies would have to have been explosively prolific. Still, the possibility that they are indeed galaxies raises as many questions as it answers. That left galaxies as the likeliest explanation for what the objects are-though even the researchers admit it will take follow-up observations to confirm that fact. ![]() Closer scrutiny of the entire image revealed no foreground bodies near enough to the six bright objects to have distorted their shape or size. That idea, however, was quickly dismissed. It was entirely possible that the seemingly galactic scale objects the authors of the new paper discovered were actually much smaller than they appeared and were simply being optically magnified. As Albert Einstein first postulated, and as more than a century of observations have confirmed, light from a distant object in space can be bent by the gravity of foreground objects, causing it to appear larger than it is-a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. That initial estimate of size, however, could have been an illusion. What’s more, they were big-big enough not to be point sources of light like a bright star or a supernova, but galactic in scale. These half dozen objects were so red they were calculated to be far enough away to have formed up to 13.3 billion years ago. The redder the color, the farther the object. The universe is continually expanding and as objects move away from us, their wavelength of light is stretched into the red spectrum. It was the color that caught the astronomers’ eyes first. ![]() Straightaway, the new survey yielded something intriguing: popping out from the otherwise unremarkable background image were six blotches of light which, though fuzzy, were extremely bright and extremely red. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |