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!
Tim says:
January 26, 2011 at 4:03 pm
“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. ”
I saw an episode of the A-Team once and they made a helicopter out of a few bales of hay…
Smokey yes I grasp a little about more then three demesions, however I can see such things as time and other demesions not existing prior to the big bang, yet I cannot imagine the basic three demesiona ever not being?
What happens when we put a better telescope up there and it ends up seeing twice as far, will they suddenly find that the universe is twice the age they estimated it to be? Then these baby galaxies would actually be mid life crisis galaxies.
Allen says:
January 26, 2011 at 4:29 pm
” …. so how do these scientists know they are speaking the truth when it is not possible to confirm it?”
Same goes for “Climate Scientists”…
Tim says:
January 26, 2011 at 4:03 pm
The galaxy is a tiny blip in the universe, filled mostly with nothing at all.
The solar system is a tiny blip in our galaxy, filled mostly with nothing at all.
The Earth is a tiny blip in our solar system, filled mostly with nothing at all.
We are tiny blips on the Earth, filled mostly with rock and metal.
1. If you have enough of these tiny blips, at some point one of them will have the right conditions for life. The rest is just life doing what it does – living and reproducing.
2. If it ever did happen, ‘us’ (the result of said event) being there to witness the results (ie ‘us’) is really a certainty, not a fluke. We can see it because we are it.
3. To think all of this was created just for us, with no evidence (other than possibly the duck-billed platypus, demonstrating humour on the part of any potential creator) is the truly fantastic idea (in the literal sense).
I think the point is that the universe didn’t expand INTO anything. The universe IS space/time – before the Big bang there was no space/time, perhaps as noted above there was nothing but probability.
However, the thing I don’t ‘get’ is how it is possible to view an object 13.5 billion light years away and say it existed just 500 million years after the big bang.
If the light indicates the object is 13.5 billion light years away NOW, that means it took 13.5 billion years for the light to reach us. But I would have thought that at all points in that 13.5 billion years we were much closer to the object. So at the point the object actually EMITTED that light, 13.5 billion years ago, where we are now must have been significantly closer to it, so one would have thought the light would have reached us much earlier than this.
I guess there is some pretty impressive math explaining how this all works, but just looking at it, I can’t for the life of me see how… I would have thought there’d be some sort of ‘event horizon’ at which light from the most distant points passes us by. Or put another way, I assume that very early on the rate of expansion fell to a significant portion less than the speed of light, which means light must always be out accelerating the rate of expansion, and therefore must not be detectable after some period of time.
Did that make sense?
Christmas eve release for rewritten New Zealand official historic temperature data.
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center produces science and scientific projects such as the Hubble Telescope and over 30 other space-based sensing platforms. How does a NASA that can produce these often amazing results allow its reputation to be debased by the questionable “temperature” databases that are produced and maintained by GISS?
Do not struggle to comprehend this information.
We are considering a conclusion based upon the most primitive data: the Lyman alpha emission of the hydrogen atom (which is in the ultraviolet) has supposedly been red-shifted (frequency-shifted) into the extreme infrared, by the expansion of the universe. The astronomer refers to delta lambda/lambda (change in wavelength divided by wavelength) in discussing the location in the spectrum of the H alpha line. For those interested, this is the emitted wavelength when the electron jumps from the second orbit back to the first orbit of the Hydrogen atom.
And a redshift of 10 has been the holy grail for quite some time.
Do not ask an astronomer how he converts this into distance. You will be hopelessly lost by the computations based on inflation and dark matter.
12 days of exposure, with so few photons, makes the announcement open to serious questioning.
Unfortunately the observation cannot be independently replicated, as we have no other space telescope able to do this kind of photography.
What makes the twinkle in that picture? An individual star? Alien teenagers with a laser pen?
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.
“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.
Yes, because the evolution of life and the spontaneous creation of an inorganic machine are EXACTLY the same. Ignoring the major logical fallacies in your argument, we’re still left with the fact that beings who evolved with the ability to detect patterns finding supposed patterns that assume a “design” in anything should be viewed with skepticism unless they can prove it.
Because despite that book you like waving around, and your deeply held faith, the burden of proof to show that a creator exists is on you guys. When you can definitively prove a god/creator, in such a way that no other explanation fits the observational data, come talk to me again about how much you can retcon reality to what the bible says. Currently, there are several secular theories that adequately explain the observational data and don’t require us to be the most important thing in the universe.
Graeme M,
The concept of inflation explains it. In a tiny fraction of a second the universe expanded to close to its present size. That is much faster than light. It could do so because spacetime itself expanded, so Relativity is not violated.
We view the early galaxies because that is what they looked like shortly after they coalesced, early in the universe’s history. Today, if we could approach them closely, they would look 13 billion years old. But we can only see them now from the light that has been traveling for 13 billion years.
There are more galaxies farther out. But we can only see as far as the time since the Big Bang. And since the light from galaxies farther out hasn’t reached us yet, they can have no effect whatever on us, and vice versa. We are effectively within a bubble of our own 13 billion light year radius – a bubble that travels with each observer, and each observer is at the center of their own 13 billion light year radius bubble.
Curiousgeorge says:
January 26, 2011 at 3:38 pm
“And does it make any difference when looking back this far in spacetime? :)”
It might if time was a first order attribute of the universe. If however time was a second order attibute that arises from the existance and density of energy would the term spacetime have any meaning? Would a light-year be a fixed distance?
How about this; If the universe is expaning then all in the universe is expaning, this includes all atoms, does this imply that the you, the earth and eveyting you see is also expanding? If your measurement equipment is also expanding at the same rate how could you know? Is the red-shift caused by the stars moving apart over time or did the photons just be bigger over time?
Is time the opposite of gravity?
Are both time and gravity second order attributes?
Neither reltivity or quanum mechanics require the existance of time for the formulas to work.
We can explain the origins of the universe…
…but can’t predict tomorrow’s weather
and have wires running everywhere, pipes underground to take away our poop, and push a gas motor with a propeller to cut our grass
We are an advanced civilization
Re: “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.”
But, of course, everybody should keep in mind that Halton Arp would counter this inference by suggesting that redshift is more appropriately an indication of a body’s AGE — as evidenced by filaments connecting high-redshift quasars with nearby galaxies.
There are other explanations for what these guys are saying which are espoused by one of the world’s leading astronomers. So, to observe that they have glossed over this debate, and taken a side FOR THE READER, I think it demonstrates that they’ve adopted the role of an advocate for conventional theories.
Arp is hardly somebody that anybody should be dismissing. I encourage everybody to watch the YouTube video titled “Cosmology Quest”, and your red flags will surely go off if you remain objective!
Andrew30 says:
“It might if time was a first order attribute of the universe.”
As Einstein showed, time cannot be considered separate from space. They are two sides of the same coin, like electro-magnetism.
“How about this; If the universe is expaning then all in the universe is expaning, this includes all atoms, does this imply that the you, the earth and eveyting you see is also expanding?”
No, expansion of the universe takes place at great distances. The red shift doesn’t affect local matter.
From what I have read, these fisrst stars are very large and so have very brief lives on the main sequence. The rate of supernovas with resultant blackholes and pulsars must be very large. I wonder if any of this is observable. I would imagine tht any supernova would be viable or at lest be more visble than the galaxy without them
@ur momisugly Andrew30 says:
January 26, 2011 at 5:41 pm
It might if time was a first order attribute of the universe. If however time was a second order attibute that arises from the existance and density of energy would the term spacetime have any meaning? Would a light-year be a fixed distance?
How about this; If the universe is expaning then all in the universe is expaning, this includes all atoms, does this imply that the you, the earth and eveyting you see is also expanding? If your measurement equipment is also expanding at the same rate how could you know? Is the red-shift caused by the stars moving apart over time or did the photons just be bigger over time?
Is time the opposite of gravity?
Are both time and gravity second order attributes?
Neither reltivity or quanum mechanics require the existance of time for the formulas to work.
I love this kind of discourse and questioning, even the faith-based parts, or any other wild and crazy thoughts. 🙂 Do you know why? Because it’s the journey that counts, not the destination. 🙂
Richard Verney wrote: “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).”
We can be sure that that the redshift value (z) = 10, but the corresponding age figure (480 million years old) depends on what cosmological model is used. The actual chronology of the early universe may have to be seriously revised in the future.
Discoveries of evolved galaxies at ever higher redshifts distresses the fashionable LCDM (dark energy + cold dark matter) paradigm similarly to how lack of global warming in recent years distresses the AGW paradigm.
Time will tell. Just wait and see…
Smokey says:
January 26, 2011 at 5:54 pm
“As Einstein showed, time cannot be considered separate from space. They are two sides of the same coin, like electro-magnetism.”
Really, where exactly?
“No, expansion of the universe takes place at great distances. The red shift doesn’t affect local matter.”
Are you saying that there is some magic distance at which point things that are farther apart than the magic distance expand and move apart and things closer then the magic distance do not?
This magic distance must be somewhere between a plank length and the size of the universe. Any idea what the require distance between to collections of energy needs to be before it begins to exhibit this expansion and moving apart attribute?
Is it a micron, a kilometer, a parsec, a light year, 10 light years, 100, 1000, a billion?
Does it make sense to you that the rules of the universe change because of relative distance?
Or is it not an actual distance but rather the volume of Ether between the collections of energy that determines the cut-off point for expansion 🙂
as a sceptic of Big Bang – the notion that the cosmos (time and space) began at a point in time in the past – if something is over 13 billion light years away, it means that it takes that long for its light to reach us. It doesn’t mean that it is 13.2 billion years years old. It would well be 200 billion years old and we’re merely seeing what happened 13 billion years ago.
Have always thought that cosmology had paradigms like climate science…
Anyhow, if the universe is infinite, that how can infinity expand on itself? Something of a paradox. The same with time. (And indeed, what is it expaning into? The great infinite cosmos)
It is inconceivable that there was a moment that did not precede another moment, soi t is quite probable to say that matter, space, time and what we understand of the cosmos today was not too dissimilar many thousands of billions of light years ago.
Big bang is a theory borrowed from the religious precept of a creator at a point in time, and fashioned along nominally scientific lines
I’m going to love the day when the new space telescope finds a galaxy older than 15 billion years. That’ll make some heads spin.
This is not a “God designed it all” idea, but I’m reasonably certain that while there may have been a “big bang”, it may not have included all matter in the universe.
Boy, a guy has to go an awfully long ways these days to find a nice, quiet little galaxy in the country.
this must be posted:)
[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buqtdpuZxvk ]
Ya, I thought i saw that last week in my binoculars… 🙂