Post by glactus on Feb 19, 2008 1:03:27 GMT
This is an artist's impression of an embryonic galaxy brimming with star birth in the early Universe, less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The illustration shows several tight clusters of stars bursting to life.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, with a boost from a natural “zoom lens”, has found the strongest evidence so far for a galaxy with a redshift significantly above 7. It is likely to be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies ever seen right after the cosmic “dark ages”, just 700 million years after the beginning of our Universe (redshift ~7.6).
Detailed images from Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) reveal an infant galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, undergoing a firestorm of star birth as it comes out of the dark ages, a time shortly after the Big Bang, but before the first stars completed the reheating of the cold, dark Universe.
Images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared Array Camera provided strong additional evidence that it was a young star-forming galaxy in the dark ages.
During its lifetime the Hubble telescope has peered ever farther back in time, viewing galaxies at successively younger stages of evolution. These snapshots have helped astronomers create a scrapbook of galaxies from infancy to adulthood. The new Hubble and Spitzer images of A1689-zD1 show a time when galaxies were in their infancy, billions of years ago.
To gaze in awe
This is part text only. See image, full text and all scientists involved at sciencedaily.com
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080212095443.htm
image credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (Space Telescope Science Institute))
