| Dreaming Of Pandora |
06-09-2010 08:54 PM |
New Research Indicates That The Universe Is Older Than We Thought.
Quote:
This galaxy [above] was spotted 10 billion light years away, and gives us a glimpse of what the Universe looked like when it was only about one-quarter of its current age.
Measurements show that the galaxy is as large and equally dense as elliptical galaxies that can be found much closer to us. The findings deepen the puzzle over how ‘fully grown’ galaxies can exist alongside seemingly ‘immature’ compact galaxies in the young Universe.
‘What our observations show is that alongside these compact galaxies were other ellipticals that were anything up to 100 times less dense and between two and five times larger - essentially ‘fully grown’ - and much more like the ellipticals we see in the local Universe around us,’ explains Michele Cappellari of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, an author of a report of the research in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
According to the NASA, these fully formed galaxies emerged just 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was barely 5% of its current age.
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, a team of French and Swiss astronomers of the European Southern Observatory, have identified an extremely faint galaxy, Abell 1835 [above].
According to interpretations, Abell 1835 must have formed just 460 million years after the universe was born, during the "Dark Age" when the first stars and galaxies were supposedly being born more recently, fully formed galaxies were discovered which are at a greater distance, over 13.1 billion light years, and which may have already been billions of years in age, over 13 billion years ago.
There are fully formed distant galaxies that must have already been billions of years old over 13 billion years ago; which would make them older than the Big Bang.
Then there is the problem of the oldest globular clusters so far discovered, whose ages are in excess of 16 billion years.
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Extract from: Daily Galaxy Blog |
