Its’ time for another mind-blowing, record-breaking discovery by the Hubble Space Telescope. This time, it’s creeping closer than ever toward the beginning of the universe.
From Phil Plait:
Astronomers have just announced they have discovered what may be the most distant galaxy ever seen, smashing the previous record holder. This galaxy is at a mind-crushing distance of 13.2 billion light years from Earth, making it not just the most distant galaxy but also the most distant extant object ever detected!
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Named UDFj-39546284, the galaxy is seen as it was just 480 million years after the Universe itself formed! The previous record holder — which was announced just last October — was 13.1 billion light years away. This new galaxy beats that by 120 million light years, a substantial amount. Mind you, these galaxies formed not long after the Big Bang, which happened 13.73 billion years ago. We think the very first galaxies started forming 200 – 300 million years after the Bang; if that’s correct then we won’t see any galaxies more than about 13.5 billion light years away. Going from 13.1 to 13.2 billion light years represents a big jump closer to that ultimate limit!
For plenty more about this, check out the rest of Phil’s post at Bad Astronomy.
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Now that the Large Hadron Collider is smashing lead, the discoveries are coming fast and furious.
Earlier this month CERN’s smashing machine switched from sending protons zinging around its ring to sending heavy lead ions at relativistic speeds. Those energetic collisions, the physicists now say, have allowed them to use the LHC’s ALICE experiment to glimpse quark-gluon plasma, the “primordial soup” present just after the Big Bang.
During this time, the Universe would have been so hot and energetic that the particles making up the elements we know today were unable to form, leaving the constituents to float “free” as a primordial soup. Quarks and gluons were only able to condense into larger particles when universal energy conditions were low enough. Hadrons (i.e. particles made from quarks; including baryons like neutrons and protons) were only allowed to form 10-6 seconds after the Big Bang. [Discovery News]
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The Big Bang was not the beginning, Roger Penrose believes.
The eminent Oxford physicist has long advocated the wild idea of “conformal cyclic cosmology,” a cyclical universe without beginning or end in which the Big Bang 13.75 billion years ago was simply one of many. This month, Penrose pushed his idea further: His team says it has detected a pattern in the cosmic microwave background—radiation left over from just after the Big Bang—that represents the echo of events that occurred before the Big Bang itself.
Penrose examined the data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), the mission that just completed nine years of surveying the cosmic microwave background across the sky. His study points to concentric circular patterns in the WMAP data where he says he found something surprising:
The circular features are regions where tiny temperature variations in the otherwise uniform microwave background are smaller than average. Those features, Penrose said, cannot be explained by the highly successful inflation theory, which posits that the infant cosmos underwent an enormous growth spurt, ballooning from something on the scale of an atom to the size of a grapefruit during the universe’s first tiny fraction of a second. Inflation would either erase such patterns or could not easily generate them. [Science News]
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It’s a trap! (For antimatter.)
Researchers report this week in Nature that they’ve managed to corral atoms of antimatter in the lab and keep them around for about one-sixth of one second—an eternity in particle physics. The ability to trap these atoms means scientists could soon have the ability to study them directly, and perhaps answer one of the fundamental questions of the universe: Why the matter and antimatter present after the Big Bang didn’t annihilate each other completely and leave a matter-less universe behind.
Jeffery Hangst led the research team at CERN’s ALPHA collaboration.
It’s not easy, because of that mutual-annihilation issue. Hangst said the first trick was to combine the particles in a super-cold vacuum setting — less than 0.5 Kelvin, or -458.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That way, the particles don’t instantly jump away and fizzle out. The second trick is to build a magnetic trap to help contain the particles so that they don’t instantly decay. And there’s a third trick: designing a system capable of verifying that the atoms actually exist. “You must have a trap, and you must be cold, and you must be able to detect that you’ve done this,” Hangst said. [MSNBC]
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From Phil Plait:
The record for the most distant object in the Universe ever seen has been smashed: a galaxy has been found at the staggering distance of 13.1 billion light years!
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It’s so dim that the faintest star you can see with your unaided eye is 4 billion times brighter. Its distance is simply numbing; the Universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old, so the light from this object began its journey on its way to Earth just 600 million years after the Universe itself formed.
Head to the full post at Bad Astronomy for all the details about how astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to find this faraway galaxy, and what the discovery tells us about the infant universe.
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When the universe was young, massive galaxies formed quickly but surprisingly peacefully. Researchers say they’ve found evidence that these galaxies didn’t grow by sucking up the remnant materials from supernovae or by violent collisions with other galaxies–instead they were fed by streams of cold gas that were funneled into their central star-forming region.
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have observed three primeval galaxies with patches of star formation near their centers, away from the heavy elements that signal the remains of previous stars. The team found that these galaxies were sucking in cool hydrogen and helium from the space between galaxies as fuel. “It solves the problem of providing to the galaxies fuel to form their stars in a continuous way, without having to invoke violent mergers and galaxy interactions,” said study researcher Giovanni Cresci. [SPACE.com]
The study, published in Nature, describes three galaxies that formed just 2 billion years after the Big Bang–which created lots of hydrogen and helium to feed hungry, growing galaxies, but created few heavier elements. Those formed later in stars and supernovae.
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Its multicolored ovals have become some of the most distinguishable pictures in science. Its estimate of the age of the universe is the most accurate ever produced. Its science team ought to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, Nobel predictors at Thomson Reuters say. But now, after nine years in space, the accomplished Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is headed for its retirement home.
The spinning WMAP satellite scanned the sky to measure tiny variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Scientists consider the CMB the first light from the young universe after matter and light could exist independently as the universe cooled. Only sensitive microwave space telescopes can detect the temperature fluctuations, which amount to just a millionth of a degree against an average backdrop of less than -450 degrees Fahrenheit. [Spaceflight Now]
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Physicist Sean Carroll, one of the people behind Cosmic Variance here at DISCOVER blogs, tweeted yesterday: “I think Stephen Hawking could say ‘ice cream is delicious’ and get massive media coverage.” He’s probably right.
Last month the renowned physicists made the news by warning of the great threat of human extinction over the next couple centuries, but kindly softened the blow by saying that we’ll be fine if we can get through our growing pains and get off this planet. Back in April, the wave of attention came from his warning that it might not be such a great idea to attempt to contact aliens, should they be more advanced than us and try to wipe us out.
Now, he’s taking on the almighty. Hawking’s new book, The Grand Design, co-authored by Leonard Mlodinow, snagged media attention this week because of an excerpt that appeared in the U.K.’s The Times (which we can’t link to, because it’s behind an online pay wall).
“Spontaneous creation is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” he wrote. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper [fuse] and set the universe going.” [CNN]
Or, to put it another way, here’s a bit from the book’s final chapter about the nature of the universe:
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If the Higgs boson is the “God Particle,” then some particle physicists just turned polytheistic. To explain a recent experiment, they wonder if five Higgs bosons give our universe mass instead of one.
Last month, we discussed a curious experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab near Chicago. Colliding protons and antiprotons, the Tevratron’s DZero group found more matter than antimatter.
This agrees well with common sense–if the Big Bang had really churned out equal amounts of matter and antimatter, the particles would have annihilated each other, and we wouldn’t be here. Unfortunately, the physics for this matter favoritism doesn’t make sense.
For one, it requires some fudging to fit the Standard Model, the organizing theory for particle physics. This might seem sad since we were so close to finishing the Standard Model up, with the Higgs filling the last cage in physicists’ particle zoo:
For those who believe the Standard Model is nearly complete, the discovery of the Higgs boson–a theoretical particle that imparts mass to all the other particles–would close out the final chapter. But for others who think that undiscovered physics properties exist–so-called new physics–a sequel to the Standard Model is needed. [Symmetry]
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Back in December 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope created the now-famous “deep field” image, which took more than 300 exposures over the course of 10 days to peer deep into the history of the universe and spot more than 1,500 galaxies. A decade and a half later—after failures, upgrades, and the “ultra deep field“—Hubble marches on. Yesterday at the American Astronomical Society meeting, astronomers announced they’d used the telescope to look deeper into the past than ever before.
The new image captures 7,500 galaxies of all kinds and shapes. The oldest galaxies in the image glow an intense blue, indicating high concentrations of the lighter elements hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen fusion inside active stars creates heavier elements such as iron and nickel, which get spread across the universe when massive stars explode. These elements cause modern galaxies to glow in a rainbow of colors, so the extreme blueness of the newfound galaxies suggests that they formed before very many massive stars had lived and died [National Geographic News].
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Talk about a long trip. An exploding star‘s burst of light traveled 13 billion years, from the early days of the universe to the present day, before being detected by astronomers here on Earth. Researchers say this exploding star is the most distant blast ever seen.
The light from the distant explosion, called a gamma-ray burst, first reached Earth on April 23 and was detected by NASA’s Swift satellite. Gamma-ray bursts are thought to be associated with the formation of star-sized black holes as massive stars collapse. Within hours, telescopes around the world were turned on the burst — the most violent explosions in the universe — observing its fading afterglow to glean clues about its source and location [SPACE.com].
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Physicists in Washington State and Louisiana recently spent two years hunting for the mysterious gravitational waves first predicted by Einstein, but detected nothing: zilch, zero, nada, nary a ripple. But that “null result” is itself of great value, researchers say, because it tells them where to look for the waves next. The findings are a nice reminder that scientific progress isn’t always about the dramatic discovery; it’s often a long, careful process of testing hypotheses, analyzing results, and heading back to the drawing board.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity states that every time mass accelerates — even when you rise up out of your chair — the curvature of space-time changes, and ripples are produced. However, the gravitational waves produced by one person are so small as to be negligible. The waves produced by large masses, though, such as the collision of two black holes or a large supernova explosion, could be large enough to be detected [SPACE.com].
Beyond those large disturbances, the universe is thought to be filled with small disturbances left over from the rapid period of expansion that followed the Big Bang, in a phenomenon known as the stochastic (meaning randomly distributed) gravitational wave background. If the expansion of the newborn universe had produced strong gravity waves, the physicists working at the two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) centers would have detected them. Since they found nothing, researchers have determined that smaller waves were produced, which they’ll need more sensitive instruments to detect. Says study coauthor Vuk Mandic: “We now know a bit more about parameters that describe the evolution of the universe when it was less than one minute old” [Sky & Telescope].
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The dormant Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea has been selected as the site of the world’s largest telescope, the much-anticipated Thirty Meter Telescope. Its enormous mirror will have nine times the light-gathering capacity as the biggest telescopes operating today, and will be able to look back to the beginnings of the universe. “It will really provide the baby pictures of the universe” [Honolulu Advertiser], says Charles Blue, a spokesman for the Thirty Meter Telescope Observatory Corporation.
The telescope’s mirror, stretching 30 meters (almost 100 feet) in diameter, will be so large that it should be able to gather light that will have spent 13 billion years traveling to earth. This means astronomers looking into the telescope will be able to see images of the first stars and galaxies forming — some 400 million years after the Big Bang [AP]. The telescope is expected to be completed by 2018, but it may not be the world’s largest for long–the European Extremely Large Telescope is scheduled for completion around the same time, and will boast a 138-foot mirror.
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Astronomers have caught sight of two stars that went kaboom only 2.5 billion years after our universe was created in the Big Bang, and say that ancient explosions are the oldest and most distant supernovas ever discovered. Researchers plan to use the new technique used to identify these supernovas to find other stars that blew up in the universe’s early days, which may aid our understanding of how the universe was seeded with heavy elements.
Only a few lightweight elements – hydrogen, helium, and lithium – are thought to have been created in the big bang; all others were forged over time in the nuclear furnaces of stars and in supernovae. Since the spectrum of light from a supernova reveals the chemical composition of the exploding star, observing many such explosions would allow astronomers to trace out a chemical history of the universe [New Scientist]. Heavier metals eventually gathered in the clouds of dust that surrounded young stars, and sometimes formed parts of rocky planets like Earth.
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The European Space Agency’s Planck observatory has reached its operating temperature of a mere tenth of a degree above the lowest temperature theoretically possible given the laws of physics, known as absolute zero. That means it’s ready for its mission: Observing the oldest light in the universe, known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, to create the clearest picture yet of what the young universe looked like.
Although scientists have achieved temperatures closer than this to absolute zero in the laboratory, the spacecraft is likely the coldest object in space. Such low temperatures are necessary for Planck’s detectors to study the Cosmic Microwave Background by measuring its temperature across the sky. Over the next few weeks, mission operators will fine-tune the spacecraft’s instruments. Planck will begin to survey the sky in mid-August [SPACE.com], and the first batch of data is expected to be released next year. Planck was launched May 14 and will observe the CMB from a spot more than 930,000 miles from Earth.
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