Hubble sees farther back in time than ever before
Above: This image of the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field is a small part of the deepest infrared image ever taken of the universe. The small blue box outlines the area where astronomers found what may be the most distant galaxy ever seen, 13.2 billion light-years away, meaning its light was emitted just 480 million years after the Big Bang. It is small and very faint and is shown separately in the larger box. The galaxy is shown as blue because it emitted very blue light due to its high rate of star birth, although by the time the light reached Hubble it had been stretched into the infrared by the expansion of space, giving it a redshift value of about 10. Its official name is UDFj-39546284, but astronomers refer to it as the “redshift 10 galaxy candidate.” Credit: NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Rychard Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz and Leiden University) and the HUDF09 Team.
Pasadena, CA— Astronomers have pushed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to it limits by finding what they believe to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe—at a distance of 13.2 billion light years, some 3% of the age of universe. This places the object roughly 150 million light years more distant than the previous record holder. The observations provide the best insights yet into the birth of the first stars and galaxies and the evolution of the universe. The research is published in the 27th January edition of Nature.
The dim object is a compact galaxy made of blue stars that existed only 480 million years after the Big Bang. It is tiny. Over one hundred such mini galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way.
Co-author Ivo Labbé of the Carnegie Observatories puts the findings into context: “We are thrilled to have discovered this galaxy, but we’re equally surprised to have found only one. This tells us that the universe was changing very rapidly in early times.”
Previous searches had found 47 galaxies at somewhat later times, when the universe was about 650 million years old. The rate of star birth therefore increased by about ten times in the interval from 480 million years to 650 million years. “This is an astonishing increase in such a short period, happening in just 1% of the age of the universe,” says Labbé.
“These observations provide us with our best insights yet into the earliest primeval objects yet to be found,” adds Rychard Bouwens of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.
Astronomers don’t know exactly when the first stars appeared in the universe, but every step back in time takes them deeper into the early universe’s “formative years” when stars and galaxies were just beginning to emerge in the aftermath of the Big Bang.
“We’re moving into a regime where there are big changes afoot. And what it tells us is that if we go back another couple hundred million years toward the Big Bang we’ll see absolutely dramatic things happening. That will be the time where the first galaxies really are starting to get built up,” says Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
The even more distant proto galaxies will require the infrared vision of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is the successor to Hubble, and next-generation ground-based telescopes, such as the Giant Magellan Telescope. These new facilities, planned for later this decade, will provide confirming spectroscopic measurements of the tremendous distance of the object being reported today.
After over a year of detailed analysis, the galaxy was positively identified in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field – Infrared (HUDF-IR) data taken in the late summer of both 2009 and 2010. These observations were made with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 3 (WFPC3) starting just a few months after it was installed into the Hubble Space Telescope in May of 2009, during the last NASA space shuttle servicing mission to Hubble.
The object appears as a faint dot of starlight in the Hubble exposures. It is too young and too small to have the familiar spiral shape that is characteristic of galaxies in the local universe, such as the Milky Way. Though individual stars can’t be resolved by Hubble, the evidence suggests that this is a compact galaxy of hot stars that first started to form over 100 to 200 million years earlier in a pocket of dark matter.
The proto galaxy is only visible at the farthest infrared wavelengths observable by Hubble. This means that the expansion of the universe has stretched its light farther that any other galaxy previously identified in the HUDF-IR, to the very limit of Hubble’s capabilities.
Astronomers plumb the depths of the universe by measuring how much the light from an object has been stretched by the expansion of space. This is called redshift value or “z.” Before Hubble was launched, astronomers could only see galaxies out to a z approximately 1, corresponding to 6 billion years after the Big Bang. The Hubble Deep Field taken in 1995 leapfrogged to z=4, or roughly 90 percent of the way back to the beginning of time. The new Advanced Camera and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field pushed back the limit to z~6 after the 2002 servicing mission. Hubble’s first infrared camera, the Near Infrared Camera and Multi Object Spectrometer reached out to z=7. The WFC3/IR reached back to z~8, and now plausibly has penetrated for the first time to z=10 (about 500 million years after the Big Bang). The Webb Space Telescope is expected to leapfrog to z~15, and possibly beyond. The very first stars may have formed between z of 30 to 15, or 100 to 250 million years post Big Bang.
The hypothesized hierarchical growth of galaxies—from stellar clumps to majestic spirals—didn’t become evident until the Hubble Space Telescope deep field exposures. The first 500 million years of the universe’s existence, from a z of 1000 to 10 is now the missing chapter in the hierarchical growth of galaxies. It’s not clear how the universe assembled structure out of a darkening, cooling fireball of the Big Bang. As with a developing embryo, astronomers know there must have been an early period of rapid changes that would set the initial conditions to make the universe of galaxies that exist today. Astronomers eagerly await the new space and ground-based telescopes to find out!
Wow, just Wow……..
And 13.2 billion years closer, the sun is still in a funk!
pRadio
Here’s a question to wrap your head around if you can. In what direction was the Hubble aimed to capture this object? And does it make any difference when looking back this far in spacetime? 🙂
Wow! The amazing thing for me is seeing just how many galaxies there are in that tiny area of space.
So basically, this galaxy is about 3 times older than the earth – pretty neat!
Perhaps this article will also help to impart to the alarmists how small the relative scale of our 150 yrs of surface temp data actually is compared to the age of the earth and its likely climate extremes?
How could a Big Bang produce a rose, apple trees, fish, sunsets, the seasons, hummingbirds, polar bears—thousands of birds and animals, each with its own eyes, nose, and mouth? Try to think of any explosion that has produced order. A child can see that there is “grand design” in creation.
Try this interesting experiment: Empty your garage of every piece of metal, wood, paint, rubber and plastic. Make sure there is nothing there. Nothing. Then wait for ten years and see if a Mercedes evolves. Try it. If it doesn’t appear, leave it for 20 years. If that doesn’t work, try it for 100 years. Then try leaving it for 10,000 years. Here’s what will produce the necessary blind faith to make the evolutionary process believable: leave it for 250 million years.
“New scientific revelations about supernovas, black holes, quarks, and the big bang even suggest to some scientists that there is a ‘grand design’ in the universe.” (U.S. News & World Re-port, March 31, 1997)
“The universe suddenly exploded into being…The big bang bears an uncanny resemblance to the Genesis command.” Jim Holt, Wall Street Journal science writer.
I find this hard to understand and yet I know it is probably true. If the universe started from a single point and expanded from there, how do you know that this galaxy is near the starting point and not as far on the other side of the beginning as we are on this side? Wheee!
Isn’t it kind of odd that we mostly readily accept the unproven hypothesis of Big Bang but not the unproven hypothesis of CAGW even though CAGW literally is closer to home in both space and time.
The psychology behind the belief is probably the same, but still how many times can astrophysicist and stellar astronomers make correction to past calculations of what was before their projections of what they say is is it and probable comes into question.
To note this galaxy isn’t all that distant. It might’ve been if it had been discovered before that other equally distant galaxy that was discovered when the known universe , apparently, hadn’t expanded so many zillion light years past the past known visible boundary which, meagerly, is the known universe.
But still I believe, but still I have to question what with what we think we know about our own planet and solar system and our own galaxy and the time it took “for us”, how feasible is it then for a galaxy to have formed in an apparent no time at all?
With sub standard optics everything looks like fuzzy white legendary splotches.
I’m wondering how this discovery is going to make anyone’s life better.
Yeah right 13billion light years and I’m a communist kool-aid drinker who came from a rock.
Nice to see that NASA are still doing some real science. When you stop and consider what is involved in the formtion of a galaxy, it is quite incredible that galaxies were up and running within what is really quite a short period of time (480 million years).
I can barely get my head around how long it would take a manned spacecraft to reach Mars. The distances being thrown about for these primeval galaxies are incomprehensible… so how do these scientists know they are speaking the truth when it is not possible to confirm it?
When the Hubble STS can be employed to achieve such observations, even after the Webb STS is operational, why should the Hubble not be continued in operation?
I know that there are arguments predicated upon the obsolescence of the platform’s technology, but as a framework upon which new hardware can be hung while the old cameras continue to provide data, the Hubble STS no more warrants de-orbiting and disposal than does the Griffith Observatory warrant condemnation and demolition.
How much real cost might be associated with continuation of the Hubble STS, particularly when orbital lift capacity is going to be required to loft and support the Webb STS successor?
Re: the philosophical question of what was “before” the big bang ( or the singularity if you prefer): In the absence of Reality (spacetime as we perceive it), Probability rules.
Harvard physicist Dr Brian Green wrote an interesting book, The Fabric Of The Cosmos, in which he explained the mathematics behind the Big Bang [which is still a hypothesis, but the most widely accepted hypothesis by physicists]. Greene explains that our 13+ billion year horizon is due to the length of spacetime since the Big Bang. In other words, the age of the visible universe.
Greene says the math explaining inflation conservatively shows that if the inflation immediately following the Big Bang caused the universe to expand to the size of the earth, then our 27 billion year [diameter] universe would be much smaller than a grain of sand. It’s a much bigger universe than what we can see.
But we can never observe anything outside of a 13 billion+ light year radius. As the universe continues to expand we’ll be able to see farther. But it will take a year to be able to see out another light year.
as for directions, it is important that one can see in that direction for a long way. Look at the center of the galaxy and you cannot see past it. There are density variations outside the galaxy as well. One must find directions that don’t have much nearer stuff blocking the view. It is an accepted principle that the universe on the large scale looks rather the same in all direction.
Smokey I have a question. What did the universe expand into?
“Pasadena, CA— Astronomers have pushed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to it limits by finding what they believe to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe—at a distance of 13.2 billion light years, some 3% of the age of universe.”
Math problem here. If the universe was only 480 million years old then how is 13.2 billion years, 3% of the age of the universe???
David says:
“Smokey I have a question. What did the universe expand into?”
How would I know?☺
“Math problem here. If the universe was only 480 million years old then how is 13.2 billion years, 3% of the age of the universe???”
May be a typo. Maybe a 9 was left off; 93%?
“”””” Tim says:
January 26, 2011 at 4:03 pm
How could a Big Bang produce a rose, apple trees, fish, sunsets, the seasons, hummingbirds, polar bears—thousands of birds and animals, each with its own eyes, nose, and mouth? Try to think of any explosion that has produced order. A child can see that there is “grand design” in creation.
Try this interesting experiment: Empty your garage of every piece of metal, wood, paint, rubber and plastic. Make sure there is nothing there. Nothing. Then wait for ten years and see if a Mercedes evolves. Try it. If it doesn’t appear, leave it for 20 years. If that doesn’t work, try it for 100 years. Then try leaving it for 10,000 years. Here’s what will produce the necessary blind faith to make the evolutionary process believable: leave it for 250 million years. “””””
Tim, are you suggesting that “Big Bangs” just don’t happen every day ? Surrely that’s good; what a pickle we’d be in if there was a whole bunch of “universes”. Evidently there aren’t a whole bunch; which is why it is called “The Universe”; it’s the only one there is. That’s why one hasn’t appeared yet, in your garage.
And no I don’t believe those people who say there’s gazillions of universes. If you can’t, and never can detect them; by any means real or theoretical; no matter what as Dr Bill Schockley would put it; then they don’t exist; and it isn’t science to even talk about it.
If it can be detected; by any means real or theoretical; then no matter how strange or weirdly it manifests itself; it IS a part of “THE UNIVERSE”.
I have a friend who works on Hubble and I asked how long the exposure was to get such dim objects in the universe from the ultra deep field photos. The image he showed me had a twelve day exposure time. Talk about a stable platform. Additionally, the image he showed us had evidence of diffraction of some of the objects indicating that dark matter was present.
“”””” David says:
January 26, 2011 at 4:42 pm
Smokey I have a question. What did the universe expand into? “””””
Who says it expanded INTO ANYTHING; it didn’t; the Universe just expanded. Balloons expand; they don’t expand into anything; they just expand, and every point on the skin moves away from every other point.
George E. Smith says:
January 26, 2011 at 4:54 pm
“”””” David says:
January 26, 2011 at 4:42 pm
Smokey I have a question. What did the universe expand into? “””””
“Who says it expanded INTO ANYTHING; it didn’t; the Universe just expanded. Balloons expand; they don’t expand into anything; they just expand, and every point on the skin moves away from every other point.”
I suppose then that three dimensional space expanded into three dimensional space? space.
David,
There are more than 3 dimensions. There are at least four, and possibly eleven. I really recommend Brian Greene’s book. It’s easy to read, very little math, and astonishing in parts.
Thanks Smokey, I like both your answers. BTW, you have many wonderful links which I assume you have catergorised. Is their any chance you could post maybe the ten or twenty best which illustrate such catergories as AGW the science, AGW the consensous, or IPCC bad science, etc, or however you have them catergorized?