# Distant Universe



## Drone (May 6, 2012)

*Using the Subaru Telescope, a team of Japanese astronomers has discovered the most distant protocluster of galaxies ever found - one that existed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. The astronomers were able to directly observe this cluster of galaxies at an early stage in galaxy evolution, when structures were beginning to form in the early Universe. This discovery will be an important step on the way to understanding structure formation and galaxy evolution.*







Objects circled in red are galaxies 12.7 billion light-years away.

Awesome news. Such structures are very faint and rare. This structure is less than 1 billion years younger than Big Bang. 

http://phys.org/news/2012-05-subaru-telescope-distant-protocluster-galaxies.html


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## Drone (Jun 2, 2012)

Bump 

Another really distant and faint object!

See the *green* source near the center of the image cutout.








> Astronomers at Arizona State University have found an *exceptionally distant galaxy*, ranked among the top 10 most distant objects currently known in space. Light from the recently detected galaxy (located 13 billion light-years away) left the object about 800 million years after the beginning of the universe, when the universe was in its infancy.



Well done.



> The galaxy, designated LAEJ095950.99+021219.1, was first spotted in summer 2011. The find is a rare example of a galaxy from that early epoch, and will help astronomers make progress in understanding the process of galaxy formation. The find was enabled by the combination of the Magellan telescopes' tremendous light gathering capability and exquisite image quality, thanks to the mirrors built in Arizona's Steward Observatory; and by the unique ability of the IMACS instrument to obtain either images or spectra across a very wide field of view.



This is indeed a very tough and difficult task



> This galaxy is extremely faint and was detected by the light emitted by ionized hydrogen. Researchers employed a unique technique they pioneered that uses special narrow-band filters that allow a small wavelength range of light through.



http://phys.org/news/2012-06-asu-astronomers-faintest-distant-galaxy.html


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## Inceptor (Jun 9, 2012)

It's nice to see that astronomers are finally getting more data from the edge of our 'visual' horizon.
It always makes me wonder if anything interesting is now going on beyond our horizon, in the now tens of billions of light years of extra space that has opened up since the time, 13 billion years ago, when this light from this galaxy started its journey to us, here.


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## Drone (Jun 23, 2012)

bump

Now ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) reveals constituent of a galaxy at *12.4 billion* light-years away. ALMA observes celestial objects at submillimeter wavelength, which penetrates through dust clouds (which block visible light). 



> Researchers from Japan and Europe, have observed a "submillimeter galaxy" located about 12.4 billion light-years away using ALMA, and has successfully detected an emission line from nitrogen contained in that galaxy.



That's cool.



> Comparisons between the data obtained by ALMA and numerical models revealed that the elemental composition of this galaxy in the early universe, at only 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang, was already close to the elemental composition of the present universe.



http://phys.org/news/2012-06-alma-reveals-constituent-galaxy-billion.html


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## hat (Jun 24, 2012)

Inceptor said:


> It's nice to see that astronomers are finally getting more data from the edge of our 'visual' horizon.
> It always makes me wonder if anything interesting is now going on beyond our horizon, in the now tens of billions of light years of extra space that has opened up since the time, 13 billion years ago, when this light from this galaxy started its journey to us, here.



The way I always thought it worked was that empty space is infinite, and the expanding space is objects drifting further apart from each other.


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## D007 (Jun 26, 2012)

Cool stuff, they are really getting out there now a days..
But there is one thing we still cannot escape in regards to the visible universe.. Our universal constant, the speed of light.. We can't see any further, because light hasn't gone any further.. No idea how big the universe really is.. It's like having a solid black balloon, inside a balloon. You can't know how big the outer balloon is, because you can't see it.


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## Pioneer.twelve (Jun 26, 2012)

What I would do to be able to travel amongst the stars...


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## D007 (Jun 26, 2012)

Pioneer.twelve said:


> What I would do to be able to travel amongst the stars...



Just jump... Really hard...  
You have to believe...


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## Drone (Jun 26, 2012)

hat said:
			
		

> empty space is


There's no such thing as <empty> space. Space itself is already something.



			
				Pioneer.twelve said:
			
		

> What I would do to be able to travel amongst the stars...



Intergalactic travel would be amazing. If human race wants to survive sooner or later they have to find a way to make it possible. Without superluminal motion (which most likely don't even exist) that'd be really hard. Maybe there are shortcuts through some hyper-dimensions, that would make everything easier.


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## W1zzard (Jun 26, 2012)

hat said:


> The way I always thought it worked was that empty space is infinite, and the expanding space is objects drifting further apart from each other.



current data suggests that the universe is flat, there is a certain amount of measuring error, which could mean that the universe is just really really big, so the local curvature we see is too small to detect it (like the earth looks flat to you). 

expanding universe means the space _between_ galaxies expands. objects that are gravitationally bound like our whole galaxy, the atoms of the earth, the atoms in your body, their electrons, do not move apart from each other.

a popular example to illustrate expanding universe is a balloon with dots painted on it (galaxies), and the balloon gets inflated, so the space between all points expands. a more accurate representation would be to glue some colored paper dots on it (so those won't expand)


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## Completely Bonkers (Jun 26, 2012)

God made the universe a Möbius strip just to fuck with us.


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## Drone (Jun 26, 2012)

There's a lot of other stuff which is more mind-fucking than Mobius strip lol. Hypertorus for example ...


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## Ahhzz (Jun 26, 2012)

Personally, I think someone glued glitter to the lens on the 'scope.....


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## Drone (Jun 27, 2012)

Ahhzz said:
			
		

> Personally, I think someone glued glitter to the lens on the 'scope.....



Lol yes it looks like that. It's amazing that light from so many stars and galaxies had made such a long way through space and time to reach us. A lot of things changed since that time, many new galaxy clusters have formed and they all create gravitational lensing to distort and to increase that distant light. Here's more news:



> Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found a puzzling arc of light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away. The galactic grouping, discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, was observed as it existed when the universe was roughly a quarter of its current age of 13.7 billion years. These images show an arc of blue light behind an extremely massive cluster of galaxies residing 10 billion light-years away.








It's no wonder the image is so fuzzy and distorted, it's so darn far away.



> The surprise in this Hubble observation is spotting a galaxy lensed by an extremely distant cluster IDCS J1426.5+3508. This cluster is the most massive found at that epoch, weighing as much as 500 trillion suns. It is 5 to 10 times larger than other clusters found at such an early time in the history of the universe. This unique system constitutes the most distant cluster known to "host" a giant gravitationally lensed arc.



What an amazing discovery!

http://phys.org/news/2012-06-rare-case-gravitational-lensing.html



> Finding this ancient gravitational arc may yield insight into how, during the first moments after the Big Bang, conditions were set up for the growth of hefty clusters in the early universe. An analysis of the arc revealed that the lensed object is a *star-forming galaxy that existed 10 billion to 13 billion years ago*.


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## bostonbuddy (Jun 27, 2012)

so these would be first generation stars?


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## de.das.dude (Jun 27, 2012)

Drone said:


> less than 1 billion years younger than Big Bang.



 so if we just had 13.7 billion light years away, we could ave seen the big bang?


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## RejZoR (Jun 27, 2012)

Theoretically, this could mean that if there are any intelligent creatures, they are probably on these distant galaxies since they were formed looooong before our galaxy did. Plenty of time to evolve.
Hell, it is even possible that there were civilizations that are already gone before even humans started walking the Earth. Who knows.


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## Drone (Jun 27, 2012)

de.das.dude said:


> so if we just had 13.7 billion light years away, we could ave seen the big bang?



Interesting question. Maybe the Big Bang can be seen from those distant clusters. In that case those alien astronomers indeed have more information than we can ever imagine.


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## W1zzard (Jun 27, 2012)

Drone said:


> Interesting question. Maybe the Big Bang can be seen from those distant clusters. In that case those alien astronomers indeed have more information than we can ever imagine.



until about 300,000 years after the big bang, the whole universe was filled with plasma. 
plasma is opaque to electromagnetic radiation = light can not travel through it





the cosmic microwave background that we see today is the first light that could move freely through the universe, and has reached us just now. due to the expansion of the universe its wavelength has been shifted down to microwave frequencies.

in theory it could be possible to observe something earlier using neutrinos, for which plasma is transparent. but it's incredibly hard to record neutrinos.

---

the aliens will "see" a sphere of same size as we do, but with the center around their own planet. the big bang happened everywhere at the same time, so there is no place where you could be, to be closer to it, to observe it any better


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## Ahhzz (Jun 27, 2012)

W1zzard said:


> .....
> 
> the aliens will "see" a sphere of same size as we do, but with the center around their own planet. the big bang happened everywhere at the same time, ....



Blasphemers!!!!


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## Drone (Jun 27, 2012)

W1zzard said:
			
		

> the aliens will "see" a sphere of same size as we do, but with the center around their own planet. the big bang happened everywhere at the same time, so there is no place where you could be, to be closer to it, to observe it any better



And what *if* aliens managed to achieve superluminal velocity and broke through that "300 000-years-after-the-big-bang" horizon?


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## W1zzard (Jun 27, 2012)

Drone said:


> And what *if* aliens managed to achieve superluminal velocity and broke through that "300 000-years-after-the-big-bang" horizon?



i dont think it makes any difference for that. if they can travel ftl, that doesnt make light from the big bang travel faster. it also doesnt change the property of plasma (in the past).

maybe Q could go back to the beginning of time and change the physical properties of stuff


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## Drone (Jun 27, 2012)

I didn't talk about light. They could travel towards primordial light
What's q?


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## W1zzard (Jun 27, 2012)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(Star_Trek)

we are actually moving towards cmb as the original, uncleaned up data from wmap shows:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050508.html

it doesn't change anything in teh data, its just added red/blue shift. to get to the image i posted earlier, scientists did some math to remove such velocities and make the data like it would be if earth was at rest.

---

if they travelled back in time to observe the early universe at their planet's location their presence there would change the (at that time very) uniform density in that region of space, which could cause a black hole to form a few B years later -> no alien planet

maybe that's why there is a cold spot:


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## Drone (Jun 27, 2012)

W1zzard said:
			
		

> we are actually moving towards cmb as the original, uncleaned up data from wmap shows:
> http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050508.html


WMAP, yes I remember now. Dark flow I guess. Like they say "_the motion may be a remnant of the influence of no-longer-visible regions of the universe prior to inflation_".


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## D007 (Jun 27, 2012)

de.das.dude said:


> so if we just had 13.7 billion light years away, we could ave seen the big bang?



Just had been 13 billion light years away? Well then we'd be in an area of space that was technically non existent. you'd be outside the big bang..lol. Unless I am misunderstanding you.. If you could exist "outside" the universe and were 13 billion light years away in nowhere land.. No you wouldn't.. because there would be no light and with no light, you get no pretty scenery.. You wouldn't even know it happened til billions of years later.

The only way you could see it would be about 13 billion years later, which is how long it would take for the light to reach you 13 billion years away from the epicenter.. lol..
To my understanding anyway..


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## Ahhzz (Jun 27, 2012)

Drone said:


> What's q?



Am I the only one that got a belly laugh out of having a discussion of science, FTL, the Big Bang, and then someone asks that question with a straight face?    who would have guessed that anyone intelligent enough to understand the discussion at all was unaware of the Star Trek "Q" reference   No insult intended Drone, promises!  Just kinda like being in a Political discussion and have someone ask why it's called "Obamagate"


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## Drone (Jun 27, 2012)

Ahhzz said:


> who would have guessed that anyone intelligent enough to understand the discussion at all was unaware of the Star Trek "Q" reference   No insult intended Drone, promises!  Just kinda like being in a Political discussion and have someone ask why it's called "Obamagate"



None taken. It's ok. I'm no sci-fi fan to be honest. I'm science fan.


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## D007 (Jun 27, 2012)

Ahhzz said:


> Am I the only one that got a belly laugh out of having a discussion of science, FTL, the Big Bang, and then someone asks that question with a straight face?    who would have guessed that anyone intelligent enough to understand the discussion at all was unaware of the Star Trek "Q" reference   No insult intended Drone, promises!  Just kinda like being in a Political discussion and have someone ask why it's called "Obamagate"



People watch star trek? XD
The movies sure.. The series.. not so much..


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## trickson (Jun 27, 2012)

Too sweet. I know there are other worlds out there! I just hope they can get here in time to stop mankind from killing it's self off!


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## W1zzard (Jun 27, 2012)

D007 said:


> Just had been 13 billion light years away? Well then we'd be in an area of space that was technically non existent. you'd be outside the big bang..lol. Unless I am misunderstanding you.. If you could exist "outside" the universe and were 13 billion light years away in nowhere land.. No you wouldn't.. because there would be no light and with no light, you get no pretty scenery.. You wouldn't even know it happened til billions of years later.
> 
> The only way you could see it would be about 13 billion years later, which is how long it would take for the light to reach you 13 billion years away from the epicenter.. lol..
> To my understanding anyway..



there is no center, imagine a two-dimensional universe being the surface of a balloon. you can not travel away from the surface because you can only move in 2 dimensions. the color of the balloon is initially strong but the more it gets inflated the dimmer the color will be (= temperature in the universe). it doesn't matter where you are on the balloon, you can only observe everything in a circle with radius as far as light would have travelled since you have been put on the balloon. that's your observable universe.


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## hat (Jun 27, 2012)

Something isn't making any sense to me here. All matter originated in a space as small as a pin point, then the big bang occurred, and threw shit everywhere. We are a small part of that, matter that got thrown out into space and through billions of years evolved into what we are now. If nothing is faster than light, or at least, the fastest thing we know of, then how is it that we are here and light from billions and billions of years ago is just now reaching us? Shouldn't it be long gone by now? Shouldn't we be looking the other direction, chasing after the old light, and steadily losing our grip on it as the light gets too far away for us to see?


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## W1zzard (Jun 27, 2012)

hat said:


> how is it that we are here and light from billions and billions of years ago is just now reaching us?



the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light.

also, if you believe in the inflation theory, the universe has expanded a lot in its early stages, so there is plenty of space for photons to travel


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## T4C Fantasy (Jun 28, 2012)

W1zzard said:


> the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light.
> 
> also, if you believe in the inflation theory, the universe has expanded a lot in its early stages, so there is plenty of space for photons to travel



what i want to know is exactly how far light has traveled in total *aka the obserable universe* because its definetly more then 13.2 billion light years since we still have a Millennia of innovation to build better scopes, right now the observable universe is a myth because we dont have the technology to see *as of yet* the edge of the universe and i do mean edge by where we can see the universe expanding as we look at it because the more time that goes by the further the universe gets... i think they say the universe is actually 31billion light years long but we can only see 13b light years because that light hasnt reached us yet, the 13billion light years is just what we can see with our technology,.. its not the farthest light has traveled to us yet.


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## W1zzard (Jun 28, 2012)

T4C Fantasy said:


> what i want to know is exactly how far light has traveled in total *aka the obserable universe*



it's not that easy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_distance



T4C Fantasy said:


> just what we can see with out technology its not the farthest light has traveled to us yet.



no matter what technology you have, there is always a limit to the distance photons can have traveled since the big bang.


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## T4C Fantasy (Jun 28, 2012)

W1zzard said:


> it's not that easy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_distance
> 
> 
> 
> no matter what technology you have, there is always a limit to the distance photons can have traveled since the big bang



yes i was reading about that earlier today, but in a millenia we should have the technology to go atleast 85% of that distance


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## W1zzard (Jun 28, 2012)

the furthest you can possibly go back to, when observing using photons is when the plasma recombination happened = cosmic microwave background

as mentioned before, there are some theories that you could observe neutrinos or even gravitational waves from before that time, but they are barely theoretical

also you would just see more and more isotropy and homogenuity = more boring


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## T4C Fantasy (Jun 28, 2012)

W1zzard said:


> the furthest you can possibly go back to, when observing using photons is when the plasma recombination happened.
> 
> as mentioned before, there are some theories that you could observe neutrinos or even gravitational waves from before that time, but they are barely theoretical
> 
> also you would just see more and more isotropy and homogenuity = more boring



yes but no matter how boring... its still science and science will not stop just because its boring... it would be like saying those little red dots in the image are insignificant because they are just dots on a picture... but its just not.


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## largon (Jun 30, 2012)

T4C Fantasy said:


> yes but no matter how boring... its still science and science will not stop just because its boring... it would be like saying those little red dots in the image are insignificant because they are just dots on a picture... but its just not.


You _totally_ misunderstood what you quoted. 
When observing universe younger (if it was possible, that is*) than when deionization / atomic recombination happened is of little interest. It was just a totally featureless glowing sphere. BORING. 

*light that was emitted inside the plasma was absorbed and no longer exists.


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## T4C Fantasy (Jun 30, 2012)

largon said:


> You _totally_ misunderstood what you quoted.
> When observing universe younger (if it was possible, that is*) than when deionization / atomic recombination happened is of little interest. It was just a totally featureless glowing sphere. BORING.
> 
> *light that was emitted inside the plasma was absorbed and no longer exists.



be realistic, when viewing that far away  they ALL look featureless, yet we still try to find them.


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## m1dg3t (Jul 2, 2012)

I see you guys finally made it to the party! Parking is 'round back


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## Inceptor (Jul 9, 2012)

W1zzard said:


> until about 300,000 years after the big bang, the whole universe was filled with plasma.
> plasma is opaque to electromagnetic radiation = light can not travel through it
> 
> http://img.techpowerup.org/120627/Capture1466.jpg
> ...



It's interesting that we live in just the right epoch to easily detect the electromagnetic 'artifacts' of the early universe.  Probably nearing the end of such an epoch, as that electromagnetic radiation will slip into the Radio region of the spectrum and then attenuate even more, in a few billion years.
I wonder...
Are we in the 'sweet spot' of the Universe's evolution?  The 'sweet spot' for possibly spring-boarding into long-term survivability on the cosmic scale.  The perfect time to accumulate adequate knowledge of the Universe's early history, to tangentially inform our technological development?
Big questions, with no answers, but interesting.


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## Drone (Jul 10, 2012)

Inceptor said:


> Are we in the 'sweet spot'. Big questions, with no answers, but interesting.



On the contrary. Many astronomers suggest that we're actually late. Expansion pushed all clusters away so everything is quite further now than it was billion years before.


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## NinkobEi (Jul 10, 2012)

RejZoR said:


> Theoretically, this could mean that if there are any intelligent creatures, they are probably on these distant galaxies since they were formed looooong before our galaxy did. Plenty of time to evolve.
> Hell, it is even possible that there were civilizations that are already gone before even humans started walking the Earth. Who knows.



Um, I always assumed this was common knowledge. Over 13 billion years there have probably been countless civilizations formed and destroyed in the universe. Hell, in our galaxy alone. Hell, maybe even in our solar system! I'm looking forward to the discovery of life in our solar system, it won't be too long, now!


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## Drone (Jul 10, 2012)

Scientists use Hubble telescope to solve 'missing satellite' problem and shed some light on dark matter and ghost galaxies.

http://phys.org/news/2012-07-hubble-telescope-unmasks-ghost-galaxies.html



> Hubble views of three small galaxies, Hercules, Leo IV and Ursa Major, reveal that they all started forming stars more than 13 billion years ago - and then abruptly stopped - all in the first billion years after the Big Bang. The extreme age of their stars is similar to M92, the oldest known globular cluster in the Milky Way.


 
These ancient galaxies no longer could form stars so they became dim and almost invisible. How could this happen? Scientists say reionisation caused that.



> The relic galaxies are evidence for a transitional phase in the early Universe that shut down star-making factories in tiny galaxies. This phase seems to coincide with the time when the first stars burned off a fog of cold hydrogen, a process called reionisation. In this period, which began in the first billion years after the Big Bang, radiation from the first stars knocked electrons off primeval hydrogen atoms, ionising the Universe's cool hydrogen gas.



Interesting theory



> The same radiation that sparked universal reionisation also appears to have squelched star-making activities in dwarf galaxies. The small irregular galaxies were born about 100 million years before reionisation began and had just started to churn out stars at that time. Roughly 2000 light-years wide, these galaxies are the lightweight cousins of the more luminous and higher-mass star-making dwarf galaxies near our Milky Way. Unlike their higher-mass relatives, the puny galaxies were not massive enough to shield themselves from the harsh ultraviolet light. What little gas they had was stripped away as the flood of ultraviolet light rushed through them. Their gas supply depleted, the galaxies could not make new stars.



Poor things, they stood no chance. Interesting read tho. Here's the picture of Leo IV captured by Hubble telescope:







Residing 500 000 light-years from Earth, Leo IV is one of more than a dozen ultra-faint (dim and star-starved) dwarf galaxies lurking around Milky Way. These galaxies are dominated by dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up the bulk of the Universe's mass.

Another interesting link:

http://phys.org/news/2012-07-dark-galaxies-early-universe.html


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## Drone (Jul 19, 2012)

*Using Hubble, Astronomers Spot Oldest Spiral Galaxy Ever Seen*

Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! 



> Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a spiral galaxy in the early universe, billions of years before many other spiral galaxies formed. Residing in the constellation Pegasus and named BX442, the surprise spiral has a redshift of 2.18, which means it is 10.7 billion light-years from Earth and therefore existed just 3 billion years after the big bang.



Light from this galaxy has been traveling to Earth for about *10.7 billion years*. Would you imagine that? Here it is:






Astronomers thought the spiral was an illusion. But using a special instrument called the OSIRIS spectrograph they determined BX442 was really a rotating spiral.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/07/hubble-spots-the-farthest-spiral.html?rss=1


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## m1dg3t (Jul 19, 2012)

Swellin' my Mellon!


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## Drone (Jul 19, 2012)

Lol your comment made my day  It's really fascinating. That galaxy is 10.7 billion light-years from Earth. That's a freaking long distance. My brain boils.


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## m1dg3t (Jul 19, 2012)

The distance isn't what has my neurons firing it's the fact that we found this early galaxy to observe! It really is an amazing time we are living in right now; our technology is allowing us look/probe farther/deeper into the cosmos allowing us to constantly be learning about our origins. They said the 18th century was the "Age of enlightenment" but i beg to differ, it was merely the begining of the separation of church/state which allowed us to reach the point we are at today; The _REAL_ "Age of Enlightenment"

We aren't here because of some super all knowing, omnipotent being who is self righteous/conceded and wanted to clone himself/herself for amusement.... 

I can't wait untill they finally start using the plasma rockets on space craft 

http://phys.org/news174031552.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket


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## D007 (Jul 19, 2012)

It's just awesome when you try to comprehend it.. Science can allow us to see things over 10 billion LIGHT YEARS away....   eesh..
I can't even see my house from my job...


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## Drone (Sep 20, 2012)

*The most distant galaxy ever detected. It's called MACS 1149-JD and it's .... 13.2 billion light-years away*









> In the big image at left, the many galaxies of a massive cluster called MACS J1149+2223 dominate the scene. Gravitational lensing by the giant cluster brightened the light from the newfound galaxy, known as MACS 1149-JD, some 15 times. At upper right, a partial zoom-in shows MACS 1149-JD in more detail, and a deeper zoom appears to the lower right. Light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching NASA's telescopes. The galaxy has a redshift, or "z," of 9.6.



That's really far away.

http://phys.org/news/2012-09-astrophysicists-spy-ultra-distant-galaxy-cosmic.html



> The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called "Dark Ages." During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. These first galaxies likely played the dominant role in the epoch of reionization, the event that signaled the demise of the universe's Dark Ages. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, neutral hydrogen gas formed from cooling particles. The first luminous stars and their host galaxies, however, did not emerge until a few hundred million years later. The energy released by these earliest galaxies is thought to have caused the neutral hydrogen strewn throughout the universe to ionize, or lose an electron, the state in which the gas has remained since that time.



It was really hard to detect it, say thanks to gravitational lensing and strongest telescopes, but unlike previous detections of galaxy candidates in this age range, which were only glimpsed in a single color, this newfound galaxy has been seen in five different wavebands.



> Objects at these extreme distances are mostly beyond the detection sensitivity of today's largest telescopes. To catch sight of these early, distant galaxies, astronomers rely on "gravitational lensing". In this phenomenon - predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago - the gravity of foreground objects warps and magnifies the light from background objects. A massive galaxy cluster situated between our galaxy and the early galaxy magnified the latter's light, brightening the remote object some *15 times* and bringing it into view. Based on the Spitzer and Hubble observations, astronomers think the distant galaxy was spied at a time when it was less than 200 million years old. *It also is small and compact, containing only about 1% of the Milky Way's mass.* According to leading cosmological theories, the first galaxies should indeed have started out tiny. They then progressively merged, eventually accumulating into the sizable galaxies of the more modern universe.





Totally unrelated: btw the oldest object, a star called *HE 1523-0901* which is *13.2 billion years old* located only 7500 ly from Earth.

And one of the oldest globular clusters is M15, located in the constellation Pegasus (~ 35000 ly away). It's *12 billion years old*.


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## Aquinus (Sep 20, 2012)

If something is 13 billion light years away, aren't we seeing that galaxy from 13 billion years ago since it takes billions of years for the light to actually get to us? So wouldn't it be more accurate that this galaxy was 13 billion light years away from us, 13 billion years ago and we might be witnessing something that happened in the past? So technically wouldn't that mean that it was a protocluster that long ago? Couldn't it be very possible that the galaxy has already formed and we just haven't seen it yet?


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## Drone (Sep 20, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> So wouldn't it be more accurate that this galaxy was 13 billion light years away from us, 13 billion years ago and we might be witnessing something that happened in the past? So technically wouldn't that mean that it was a protocluster that long ago? Couldn't it be very possible that the galaxy has already formed and we just haven't seen it yet?


In the article (and so in my post above) it's said that galaxy is less than 200 million years old (not even a toddler). Indeed it was so 13.2 billion years ago. Now that galaxy is full grown but to see it you need to wait another 13.2 billion years.


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## Aquinus (Sep 20, 2012)

Drone said:


> In the article (and so in my post above) it's said that galaxy is less than 200 million years old (not even a toddler). Indeed it was so 13.2 billion years ago. Now that galaxy is full grown but to see it you need to wait another 13.2 billion years.



That just means that the galaxy is 13.4 billion years old, and we're seeing it from 13.2 billion years ago. We're just seeing the past, the galaxy isn't actually that young. It's more of a "how things used to be." So we can't say its forming because over 13.2 billion years, it most likely has mostly formed by now. Just because we haven't seen it yet doesn't mean it hasn't happened. 

"If a tree in the forest falls and there is no one to hear it, did the tree actually make a noise when it fell?"


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## Drone (Sep 20, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> Just because we haven't seen it yet doesn't mean it hasn't happened.
> 
> "If a tree in the forest falls and there is no one to hear it, did the tree actually make a noise when it fell?"



That can be said just about everything you see in everyday life  It happens because it's limited by speed of light. Carl Sagan explained it well with a "magical camera".



> Your nose is just a little closer to me than your ears. Light reflected off your nose reaches me just an instant in time before your ears. But suppose I had a magic camera so that I could see your nose and your ears at precisely the same instant. With such a camera you could take some pretty interesting pictures.


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## Easy Rhino (Sep 20, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> If something is 13 billion light years away, aren't we seeing that galaxy from 13 billion years ago since it takes billions of years for the light to actually get to us? So wouldn't it be more accurate that this galaxy was 13 billion light years away from us, 13 billion years ago and we might be witnessing something that happened in the past? So technically wouldn't that mean that it was a protocluster that long ago? Couldn't it be very possible that the galaxy has already formed and we just haven't seen it yet?



when you look through a telescope you are indeed time traveling. hell, if you have working eyes you are time traveling. the computer monitor that you see in front of you...well that image your brain processed is of how that monitor existed 0.000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds ago. so the computer monitor you "see" is not the same one that actually exists the moment you see it. now try and fall asleep tonight


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## Aquinus (Sep 20, 2012)

Easy Rhino said:


> when you look through a telescope you are indeed time traveling. hell, if you have working eyes you are time traveling. the computer monitor that you see in front of you...well that image your brain processed is of how that monitor existed 0.000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds ago. so the computer monitor you "see" is not the same one that actually exists the moment you see it. now try and fall asleep tonight



.000000000000001 seconds is a little less than 13.2 billion years. Also, your brain needs to interpret what you're seeing, so it's a little longer so you're working in the millisecond range. 

The point I'm trying to say is that the time it takes light to get to you at a monitor isn't significant because very little changes have taken place since the light was emitted and when you saw it. Another galaxy on the other hand is nothing like it is right now, with how we're seeing it. That's all I'm saying.


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## Drone (Sep 20, 2012)

It would be awesome when future humans will travel for long distances. Then they could look back from some distant galaxy at young Earth and see how life formed.


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## Easy Rhino (Sep 20, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> .000000000000001 seconds is a little less than 13.2 billion years. Also, your brain needs to interpret what you're seeing, so it's a little longer so you're working in the millisecond range.
> 
> The point I'm trying to say is that the time it takes light to get to you at a monitor isn't significant because very little changes have taken place since the light was emitted and when you saw it. Another galaxy on the other hand is nothing like it is right now, with how we're seeing it. That's all I'm saying.



well duh. but it still shows the point of relativity. perception is reality to all living creatures.


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## Benetanegia (Sep 20, 2012)

Drone said:


> It would be awesome when future humans will travel for long distances. Then they could look back from some distant galaxy at young Earth and see how life formed.



As stupid as it sounds, I never thought of that. What a practical way of learning history!! Amazing stuff.


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## Drone (Sep 20, 2012)

Benetanegia said:


> As stupid as it sounds, I never thought of that. What a practical way of learning history!! Amazing stuff.



Lol yeah but I was only 50% serious about that. Let's say we travel 50 000 light years away and look back. How strong a telescope has to be to see what's happening on Earth's surface. How far could we zoom in


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## Easy Rhino (Sep 20, 2012)

Drone said:


> Lol yeah but I was only 50% serious about that. Let's say we travel 50 000 light years away and look back. How strong a telescope has to be to see what's happening on Earth's surface. How far could we zoom in



you would have to travel faster than the speed of light for it to work which would essentially be traveling through time.


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## phanbuey (Sep 20, 2012)

Benetanegia said:


> As stupid as it sounds, I never thought of that. What a practical way of learning history!! Amazing stuff.



we would have to teleport a few billion light years away, and then point a telescope powerful enough to record what little incoming light is left.

or we could just record history by making up stuff for the parts that we dont know/like like we have always done  .


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## Drone (Sep 20, 2012)

Easy Rhino said:


> you would have to travel faster than the speed of light for it to work which would essentially be traveling through time.



I see. What if it was possible if that light (from the young Earth) could be reflected and sent back and people of let's say 50th century could see it.


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## Benetanegia (Sep 20, 2012)

Come on guys we are talking about FTL travel defying or circumventing (warp drive, wormhole, etc.) the laws of physics and you're all nitpicking about the telescope*?? 

EDIT: And yeah I was talking about more like travelling 500 light years. Maybe even only travel ~50 light years and see who the fuck killed JFK. Both the shorter travel and required augmentation, are more realistic. 

And TBH what real interest would really have to see the Earth billions of years ago? It' would be just a normal planet, in a normal star, We have trillions of such objects we can study from "home".


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## Aquinus (Sep 20, 2012)

Drone said:


> It would be awesome when future humans will travel for long distances. Then they could look back from some distant galaxy at young Earth and see how life formed.



Heisenberg would disagree with you.

The further away you travel from earth the less light that actually gets to you coming from our planet. There could come a point where you would be too far to see it, and honestly you don't have to get too far away from our solar system for that to happen. Earth is tiny in the grand scheme of things.


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## Drone (Sep 21, 2012)

Heisenberg was a pessimist. There's gravitational lensing.


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## Aquinus (Sep 21, 2012)

Drone said:


> Heisenberg was a pessimist. There's gravitational lensing.



You can't focus light if it isn't any there. No kind of lense is going to help you here especially with how far away you have to go from the earth.


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## Benetanegia (Sep 21, 2012)

Aquinus said:


> You can't focus light if it isn't any there.



Light is there. Maybe too dim for current tech to extract any information from it. Maybe too dispersed. The fact that we can see galaxies 13.4 billion light years away from us says that, first light is there, and second that it can stay "focused" enough for us to see.



> No kind of lense...



A massive cloud of nanoreceptors in space each capable of detecting light intensity down to a single photon or neutrino and capable of "recording" their momentum (the loss of position info is irrelevant, position is roughly that of the receptor). Info passed to a "computer" capable of interpreting that info, determining the procedence of particles based on momentum and nearby objects (starts, galaxies, etc) that might have influenced are processed and recognized and taken into account too. And finally constructing an "aproximate" image. Aproximate and vague in subatomic level, but since resolution is down to subatomic level, the accuracy of each "pixel" becomes irrelevant, the overall picture is accurate to our eyes.


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## 3870x2 (Sep 21, 2012)

m1dg3t said:


> The distance isn't what has my neurons firing it's the fact that we found this early galaxy to observe! It really is an amazing time we are living in right now; our technology is allowing us look/probe farther/deeper into the cosmos allowing us to constantly be learning about our origins. They said the 18th century was the "Age of enlightenment" but i beg to differ, it was merely the begining of the separation of church/state which allowed us to reach the point we are at today; The _REAL_ "Age of Enlightenment"
> 
> We aren't here because of some super all knowing, omnipotent being who is self righteous/conceded and wanted to clone himself/herself for amusement....
> 
> ...



Its conceited, and some of us here at TPU are Christians, *and* science freaks.

Atheists aren't the only people that are happy about the separation of church and state.



D007 said:


> It's just awesome when you try to comprehend it.. Science can allow us to see things over 10 billion LIGHT YEARS away....   eesh..
> I can't even see my house from my job...



With the equivalent hubble telescope at your house, you still wouldn't be able to see your house from your job.  Going by this logic your house must be very far away



Drone said:


> Lol yeah but I was only 50% serious about that. Let's say we travel 50 000 light years away and look back. How strong a telescope has to be to see what's happening on Earth's surface. How far could we zoom in



You would have to be travelling faster than the speed of light to be able to see light from the earth in the past, it isn't just a matter of travelling x distance.  This could be alleviated by warping (folding space-time) which has recently been revisited due to some amazing discoveries.

I have a feeling you know all of this already.


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## Drone (Sep 21, 2012)

3870x2 said:


> You would have to be travelling faster than the speed of light to be able to see light from the earth in the past, it isn't just a matter of travelling x distance.
> I have a feeling you know all of this already.


Yes I do know that. I was thinking about wormholes because space and time are related. But the universe is a strange thing even if it's 13.7 billion years old, there's something beyond that point because the diameter of the universe is much bigger than 13.7.


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## 3870x2 (Sep 21, 2012)

Drone said:


> Yes I do know that. I was thinking about wormholes because space and time are related. But the universe is a strange thing even if it's 13.7 billion years old, there's something beyond that point because the diameter of the universe is much bigger than 13.7.



BTW I love your enthusiasm in this sub-forum, keep up the amazing threads!


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## Drone (Sep 25, 2012)

*Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF)*








> This image, called XDF, combines Hubble observations taken over the past decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax.



It is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. It allows us to explore further back in time than ever before. 



> The image covers an area less than a tenth of the width of the full Moon, making it just a 30 millionth of the whole sky. Yet even in this tiny fraction of the sky, the long exposure (over one million seconds) reveals about 5500 galaxies, some of them so distant that we see them when the Universe was less than 5% of its current age. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness that the unaided human eye can see.



That's so impressive! It's amazing how the Universe is truly changing as it ages.



> The Universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the XDF reveals galaxies that span back 13.2 billion years in time. Most of the galaxies in the XDF are seen when they were young, small, and growing, often violently as they collided and merged together. The early Universe was a time of dramatic birth for galaxies containing brilliant blue stars far brighter than our Sun. The light from those past events is just arriving at Earth now, and so the XDF is a time tunnel into the distant past when the Universe was just a fraction of its current age. *The youngest galaxy found in the XDF existed just 450 million years after the Universe's birth in the Big Bang.*



Fascinating. Astronomers plan to push the XDF even deeper, into a time when the first stars and galaxies formed and filled the early "dark ages" of the Universe with light. Good luck to them 

http://phys.org/news/2012-09-hubble-extreme-deepest-view-universe.html


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## xBruce88x (Sep 27, 2012)

3870x2 said:


> Its conceited, and some of us here at TPU are Christians, *and* science freaks.
> 
> Atheists aren't the only people that are happy about the separation of church and state.
> 
> ...



There's still one more thing to consider... earth's location "x" amount of years ago when you go to look back at it... since earth is always moving it won't be "here" when you go to look back at it "x" lightyears away, you'd have to figure out where the old earth would be at in the past.

this brings up an interesting theory (well i just thought of it)... if we could accurately pinpoint earth's exact location say... 50 light years away (and therefore 50years) ago, would it be possible to aim the telescope at that exact spot and see our old reflection if you will...


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## largon (Oct 1, 2012)

If we found a way to travel that 50 LYs in less than 50 years (let alone several millenia) I'd reckon we'd have more interesting things to do than building a telescope to look back at Earth only to see ourselves of the past pondering on how to travel to that spot 50 LYs away...


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## Drone (Nov 16, 2012)

We have a new distance record holder. It's the newly discovered galaxy, named *MACS0647-JD*, as it was 420 million years after the Big Bang. Its light has travelled for *13.3 billion years* to reach Earth, which corresponds to a redshift of approximately 11.

Just think about that, the light has been on the road for billions of years. 







Yeah, that tiny dot. It's a baby galaxy. Very tiny.



> The object is so small it may be in the first stages of galaxy formation, with analysis showing the galaxy is less than 600 ly across. For comparison the Milky Way is 150 000 ly across. The estimated mass of this baby galaxy is roughly equal to 100 million or a billion suns, or 0.1 - 1 % the mass of our Milky Way's stars.



Tiny and young.



> Along the way, 8 billion years into its journey, the galaxy's light took a detour along multiple paths around the massive galaxy cluster MACS J0647.7+7015. Due to the gravitational lensing, the team observed three magnified images of MACS0647-JD with Hubble. The cluster's gravity boosted the light from the faraway galaxy, making the images appear far brighter than they otherwise would, although they still appear as tiny dots in Hubble's portrait.



Thanks to gravitational lensing, otherwise they'd have never found it. I hope that James Webb Space Telescope (scheduled for launch in 2018) will shed more light on this 

http://phys.org/news/2012-11-hubble-candidate-distant-universe.html


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## micropage7 (Nov 16, 2012)

Scientists may have glimpsed the most distant galaxy ever seen. The galaxy, known as MACS0647-JD, appeared as a tiny dot behind an enormous galactic cluster that lies between the Big and Little Dipper.

Scientists combined data from the Hubble space telescope with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to make the discovery. MACS0647-JD would have existed about 13.3 billion years ago, or roughly 420 million years after the Big Bang. This would place it around 200 million years earlier than previous candidates for most distance object ever spotted

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/11/distant-galaxy-hubble/


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## Drone (Dec 7, 2012)

> A galaxy cluster, MOO J2342.0+1301, *7.7 billion ly* away has been discovered using infrared data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). It is hundreds of times more massive than our Milky Way.



Galaxy clusters from the first half of the universe are hard to find because they are so far away and because not very many had time to assemble by then. What's more, they are especially hard to see using visible-light telescopes: light that left these faraway structures in visible wavelengths has been stretched into longer, infrared wavelengths due to the expansion of space. WISE can hunt some of these rare colossal structures down because it scanned the whole sky in infrared light.

And they did it using the 16-inch (40 cm) telescope which ran out of its coolant  Well done! It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it  



> "I had pretty much written off using WISE to find distant galaxy clusters because we had to reduce the telescope diameter to only 16 inches [40 centimeters] to stay within our cost guidelines, so I am thrilled that we can find them after all," said Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. and an author of the new paper. "The longer exposures from AllWISE open the door wide to see the most massive structures forming in the distant universe."



http://phys.org/news/2012-12-telescope-spies-gigantic-galaxy-clusters.html


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## HammerON (Dec 7, 2012)

Another thread I will sub to thanks to Drone


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## Drone (Dec 8, 2012)

^You're welcome HammerON 

Little bit old news (July 2011) but it's never late I guess. Very interesting read and indeed post-worthy.



> European astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have spied a quasar at a record breaking distance across the cosmos. This one called *ULAS J1120+0641* is powered by a supermassive black hole 2 billion times the mass of the Sun. It is shining at us from a distance of *12.9 billion light years away*, that's just 770 million years after the birth of the universe. Although not the furthest actual object found, this furthest quasar does also rank as the brightest object so far discovered in the very early universe.



Science Daily

Astronomy Central










That's mesmerizing.


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## Drone (Dec 15, 2012)

Quasar named GB 1428+4217 produced *the most distant X-ray jet* ever observed.
GB 1428 is located *12.4 billion ly* from Earth. The researchers think the length of the jet in GB 1428 is at least 230,000 ly, or about twice the diameter of the entire Milky Way.


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## Drone (Jan 9, 2013)

*Astronomers have discovered the most distant supernova*



> The supernova, known as _SN SCP-0401_, is *10 billion ly* from Earth, meaning it exploded just 3.7 billion years after the Big Bang.








It's a Type 1a supernova



> Type 1a supernova is a dead white dwarf star that erupts in a titanic blast after borrowing enough material from a companion star to reach critical mass.
> 
> Type 1a supernovae all have relatively similar brightnesses, and astronomers thus use them to measure cosmic distances (the dimmer a Type 1a appears to be, the farther away it is from us).



This discovery should help astronomers better understand the nature of dark energy. Even though this supernova is so distant and faint  (the equivalent of looking at a firefly from 5000 km away)

SPACE.com


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## 3870x2 (Jan 9, 2013)

Everything in the universe is effected by gravity, now what if - hear me out on this - what if it isn't the big bang that is propelling us in that direction, but rather we are being pulled in by something that is so massive, that its gravity is pulling the universe as we know it to itself.

Deep shlt man.


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## Drone (Jan 9, 2013)

3870x2 said:
			
		

> Everything in the universe is effected by gravity, now what if - hear me out on this - what if it isn't the big bang that is propelling us in that direction, but rather we are being pulled in by something that is so massive, that its gravity is pulling the universe as we know it to itself.



What you've just said is exactly what brane cosmology is about  It says that dark energy can be a gravitational pull exerted by neighboring brane (Universe) which leads to our Universe's expansion.


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## 3870x2 (Jan 9, 2013)

Drone said:


> What you've just said is exactly what brane cosmology is about  It says that dark energy can be a gravitational pull exerted by neighboring brane (Universe) which leads to our Universe's expansion.



sigh, of course it has been thought of already

I like reading about these things though.  I wish we could get a supernova closer than the one in 1604, but atleast 20 ly away.  Apparently three go off per century in the Milky way, but I guess they are either too small, or too far away.


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## Drone (Jan 9, 2013)

3870x2 said:
			
		

> ...but I guess they are either too small, or too far away.



Yeah unfortunately we (Solar system) located in "suburban" area of Milky Way, the least exciting place :'( Luckily there will be James Webb telescope which can observe areas never seen before. Without uber high technologies and space travel we won't see much.


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## 3870x2 (Jan 9, 2013)

Drone said:


> Yeah unfortunately we (Solar system) located in "suburban" area of Milky Way, the least exciting place :'( Luckily there will be James Webb telescope which can observe areas never seen before. Without uber high technologies and space travel we won't see much.



This telescope is one of the things I am most excited for.  This telescope could reinvent the way we see space.  Imagine the pictures we didn't have before the Hubble telescope.


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## Drone (Mar 12, 2013)

Extremely rare triple quasar found.








> The light from this rare triple quasar, called QQQ J1519+0627 has travelled *9 billion ly* to reach us, which means the light was emitted when the universe was only a third of its current age.
> 
> Two members of the triplet are closer to each other than the third. This means that the system could have been formed by interaction between the two adjacent quasars, but was probably not triggered by interaction with the more-distant third quasar.


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## Drone (Oct 24, 2013)

*The most distant galaxy yet*








> This image from the Hubble Space Telescope CANDELS survey highlights *z8_GND_5296 - the most distant galaxy in the universe*. The galaxy’s red color alerted astronomers that it was likely extremely far away and, thus, seen at an early time after the Big Bang. A team of astronomers measured the exact distance using the Keck I telescope with the new MOSFIRE spectrograph. They found that this galaxy is seen at about 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just 5% of its current age of 13.8 billion years.



Source


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## HammerON (Oct 24, 2013)

Very cool


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## Drone (Nov 20, 2013)

> Astronomers have discovered two of the oldest brown dwarfs (*WISE 0013+0634* and *WISE 0833+0052*) in the Galaxy. These ancient objects are moving at speeds of 100-200 km/s, much faster than normal stars and other brown dwarfs and are thought to have formed when the Galaxy was very young, more than 10 billion years ago. These oldest brown dwarfs have temperatures of 250-600 degrees Celsius. They lie in the Pisces and Hydra constellations respectively. The spectral signatures of these failed stars' light reflects their ancient atmospheres, which are almost entirely made up of hydrogen rather than having the more abundant heavier elements seen in younger stars.



Absolutely amazing discovery! And there are thought to be as many as 70 billion brown dwarfs in the Milky Way’s thin disk!!!













Images of WISE 0013+0634 & WISE 0833+0052 respectively.


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## Drone (Apr 24, 2014)

Distant gravitationally lensed type 1a Supernova discovered. It's called PS1-10afx and located ~ *9 billion ly* from Earth. It's just happened to be magnified 30 times by a well-placed cosmic lens (galaxy).


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## 4ghz (Apr 24, 2014)

The size of known universe is limited only by the light that have reached us, and the oldest light source is only a few hundred million years after the big bang. But really, how big is the actual universe?  Since there is no real "center" of the universe, for all we know we're about 50 billion LY away from the center (ground zero) of the big bang?

Tying to think infinite universe is giving me headaches. I think I'll leave that to quantum computer. (and let it figure out what the universe was like before the big bang.)


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## Drone (May 7, 2014)

New amazing computer simulation of cosmic web


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## Drone (May 21, 2014)

The image of the center of the newly confirmed *JKCS 041* galaxy cluster, located at a distance of *9.9 billion ly*. The galaxies located in the cluster are circled. Blue circles show the few galaxies that continue to form new stars, while yellow circles show those that have already entered quiescence.


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## Ahhzz (May 21, 2014)

It's almost depressing realizing how much of the known universe we'll never get to see, know about, understand, nor our children's children.... and beyond that, we may have screwed ourselves so badly that it won't matter....


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## revin (May 21, 2014)

Awesome thread Drone !! Thanks for keeping us updated !


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## Gilletter (May 21, 2014)

Ever think we're just a spec of dust on the eyelid of some creature that we are microscopic to? Like bacteria to our relative size...


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## Drone (May 22, 2014)

Agree with everyone. Universe is amazing. Here's a nice article with *Kip Thorne* and some cool videos:


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## Drone (Jun 7, 2014)




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## Ahhzz (Jun 7, 2014)

saw that earlier this week, tried to find a good pic of it, to post up here, and got distracted by a server failure :/  thx Drone


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## Drone (Jun 12, 2014)




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## Drone (Jul 31, 2014)

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have unexpectedly discovered the most distant cosmic magnifying glass, produced by a monster *elliptical galaxy* located 9.6 billion ly away.  "Lensing" galaxies are so massive that their gravity bends, magnifies, and distorts light from objects behind them (gravitational lensing).
The object behind the cosmic lens is a tiny *spiral galaxy *located 10.7 billion ly away. It's undergoing a rapid burst of star formation.


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## Drone (Oct 17, 2014)

Astronomers found extremely distant galaxy using the lensing power of the mammoth galaxy cluster Abell 2744 (Pandora’s Cluster) which produced three magnified images of the same faint galaxy. Each magnified image makes the galaxy appear 10 times larger and brighter. The diminutive object is estimated to be >13 billion ly away.






This galaxy is an example of what is suspected to be an abundant, underlying population of extremely small, faint objects that existed ~ 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The galaxy measures merely 850 ly across - 500 times smaller than Milky Way - and is estimated to have a mass of only 40 million suns. The Milky Way, in comparison, has a stellar mass of a few hundred billion suns. And the galaxy forms about one star every three years, whereas the Milky Way galaxy forms roughly one star per year. However, given its small size and low mass, the tiny galaxy actually is rapidly evolving and efficiently forming stars.

NASA


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## Drone (Dec 18, 2014)

A newly discovered galaxy cluster Gioiello is the most massive one ever detected with an age of 800 million years or younger.
Astronomers determined that the Gioiello Cluster lies ~ *9.6 billion ly away* and contains a whopping *400 trillion times the mass of the Sun*.


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## Drone (Sep 4, 2015)

Caltech astronomers detect the farthest galaxy







Faint galaxy called EGS8p7 that is more than *13.2 billion years old* (at a redshift of 8.68).

EGS8p7, which is unusually luminous, may be powered by a population of unusually hot stars, and it may have special properties that enabled it to create a large bubble of ionized hydrogen much earlier than is possible for more typical galaxies at these times


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## Drone (Sep 9, 2015)

Astronomers have generated the most accurate statistical description yet of faint, early galaxies as they existed in the universe 500 million years after the Big Bang






When all the stars and galaxies are masked, the background signals can be isolated, as seen in the second and third panels. The middle one reveals “intrahalo light” from rogue stars torn from their host galaxies, and the panel on the right captures the signature of the first galaxies formed in the universe

Scientists separate noise from the faint signal associated with first galaxies by looking at the variations in the intensity from one pixel to another.


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## Drone (Sep 10, 2015)

Amazing discovery!




Galaxy cluster SpARCS1049+56, has at least 27 galaxy members, and a combined mass equal to nearly 400 trillion suns. It is located *9.8 billion ly* away in the Ursa Major constellation.

A smaller galaxy seems to have recently merged with the monster galaxy in the middle of the cluster, lending its gas to the larger galaxy and igniting a fury of new stars (~  *860 new ones a year*!!!). For reference, our Milky Way makes only about 1-2  stars per year.


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## Drone (Oct 15, 2015)

Unrelated but great lecture


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## Drone (Nov 4, 2015)

I don't even know what to say and what can I say anyway it's just so .. ... Maaaan






Astronomers have discovered a *Massive Overdense Object* (MOO J1142+1527) in a very remote part of the universe, thanks to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and WISE. The galaxy cluster, located *8.5 billion ly away*, is the most massive structure yet found at such great distances.

*The cluster's mass is a quadrillion times that of our sun* - making it the most massive known cluster that far back in space and time.


"Based on our understanding of how galaxy clusters grow from the very beginning of our universe, this cluster should be one of the five most massive in existence at that time," said co-author Peter Eisenhardt, the project scientist for WISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The red galaxies at the center of the image make up the heart of the galaxy cluster.


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## Drone (Nov 5, 2015)

PKS 0637-752 is *6 billion* ly away. It is a luminous quasar that radiates with the *power of 10 trillion suns* from a region *smaller than our solar system*. The source of this prodigious energy is believed to be a supermassive black hole. (Chandra took that image in 1999)








*Astrosat's Soft X-ray Telescope* sees PKS 2155-304, a special type of quasar. The targeted object is an X-ray source, belonging to an enigmatic class of supermassive black holes in a galaxy *1.5 billion ly away*.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Nov 5, 2015)

Drone said:


> Astrosat's Soft X-ray Telescope




Something to be celebrated





India's first satellite dedicated to astronomical observations, saw its first light from an astronomical source on Oct. 26, 2015, after the camera door was opened at 06:30UT. The telescope door covering the optics had already been opened 10 days earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrosat

VID  which is worth a watch....less than 2 mins
http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/news/astrosat-india-s-own-observatory-launched-into-space/384680


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## Drone (Nov 5, 2015)

Leonard Susskind on The World As Hologram










Pay attention to every detail in this 55 min awesomeness


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## Drone (Nov 18, 2015)

ESO's VISTA survey telescope has spied _574_ previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have for the first time found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared.

UltraVISTA has been imaging the patch of sky, ~ 4 times the size of a full Moon, since December 2009. This is the largest patch of sky ever imaged to these depths at infrared wavelengths.

“_We found no evidence of these massive galaxies earlier than around 1 billion years after the Big Bang, so we're confident that this is when the first massive galaxies must have formed,_” concludes Henry Joy McCracken, a co-author on the paper.

In addition, the astronomers found that massive galaxies were more plentiful than had been thought. Galaxies that were previously hidden make up half of the total number of massive galaxies present when the Universe was between 1.1 and 1.5 billion years old.


Download giant image (*283 MB*)


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## Drone (Feb 23, 2016)

*MACS J0717.5+3745* is a group of galaxies, one of the largest and most complex known with the equivalent of _> 10 000 Milky Way-sized galaxies_. It's located ~ *5 billion ly away*.

Astronomers used the Jansky Very Large Array to hunt for lensed radio sources in this cluster, and detected 51 compact galaxies - seven whose _light seems to be magnified by the cluster by more than factor of two and as much as a factor of nine_. The scientists infer from the radio fluxes that most of these seven are forming new stars at a modest rate, 10-50 per year, and date from an epoch ~ 3 billion years after the Big Bang. Two are also detected in X-rays by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and so host AGN, each one radiating about as much light in X-rays as a billion Suns. The two AGN are interesting in themselves, but finding them both in this one region suggests that, like bright star forming galaxies, these AGN were more common back then too.


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## Drone (Feb 25, 2016)

An international team of scientists using a combination of radio and optical telescopes identified the distant location of a fast radio burst (FRB) for the first time. This discovery has allowed them to confirm the current cosmological model of the distribution of matter in the Universe.

Looking at CMBR, modern satellite observatories like COBE, WMAP and Planck have gradually refined our understanding of the composition of the universe, and the most recent measurements suggest it consists of 4.9% normal matter [baryons], whereas 26.8% is 'dark matter', and 68.3% is the even more mysterious 'dark energy'.

The team members from UTokyo, NAOJ, and Konan University next examined an optical image of the *FRB 150418* taken a day after the first flash by the NAOJ's 8.2-m Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. The image revealed a possible source: *an elliptical galaxy ~ 6 billion ly away*.


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## Drone (Feb 26, 2016)

I've added a link and video to the post above


More interesting news:

*Cosmic voids* could contain as much as 20% of the 'normal' matter in the cosmos. Galaxies are located in filaments that make up a '*cosmic web*'.

*Illustris* is a large computer simulation of the evolution and formation of galaxies, to measure the mass and volume of these filaments and the galaxies within them. It simulates a cube of space in the Universe, measuring some 350 million ly on each side.

When the astronomers looked at the data, they found that ~ *50% of the total mass of the Universe is in the places where galaxies reside*, compressed into a volume of 0.2% of the Universe we see, and a further *44% is in the enveloping filaments*. Just *6% is located in the voids*, which make up 80% of the volume. But they also found that a *surprising fraction of normal matter - 20% - is likely to be have been transported into the cosmic voids*. The culprit appears to be the supermassive black holes found in the centers of galaxies.





This slab cut from the cube generated by the Illustris simulation shows the distribution of *normal matter*.





The same slice of data, this time showing the distribution of *dark matter*.



************

More Distant Universe related news:

Astronomers have discovered a large area of diffuse emission [*radio halo*], estimated to be ~ 3 million ly wide. The newly detected halo is located in a distant massive merging galaxy cluster designated MACSJ2243.3-0935. The formation of radio halos is believed to be linked to the _merger of galaxy clusters_, which are hugely energetic events - roughly equivalent to a *trillion supernovae explosions*. One formation scenario suggests that turbulence in the gas of the galaxy cluster accelerates particles to radio-emitting energies leading to the production of radio halos.


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## Drone (Feb 27, 2016)

I guess I'll post it here:

Black Holes and the Structure of Spacetime










Quantum Mechanics and the Geometry of Spacetime 































Btw if you don't know *Juan Maldacena* and *Hitoshi Murayama .. *they're brilliant theorists


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## Drone (Mar 3, 2016)

I was waiting for this and it happened! 

By pushing NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the *farthest galaxy ever seen in the Universe*. This surprisingly bright, infant galaxy, named *GN-z11*, is seen as it was *13.4 billion* years in the past [at a *redshift of 11.1*], just 400 million years after the Big Bang [when the Universe was only 3% of its current age]. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major.

The combination of Hubble's and Spitzer's imaging reveals that GN-z11 is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way and has just 1% of our galaxy's mass in stars [~ a billion solar masses]. However, the newborn GN-z11 is growing fast, *forming stars at a rate ~ 20 times greater than our galaxy does today*.


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Mar 3, 2016)

Where to look for it ....


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## Drone (Mar 3, 2016)




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## Drone (Mar 8, 2016)

A group of researchers using the Suprime-Cam instrument on the Subaru Telescope has discovered *80 young galaxies at the distance of 12.6 billion ly.*

At least 54 of the galaxies are spatially resolved in the ACS images. Among them, 8 galaxies show double-component structures and the remaining 46 seem to have elongated structures. 2 galaxies seem to be merging with each other.

These results strongly suggest that 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, galactic clumps in the young Universe grow to become large galaxies through mergers, which then causes active star formation to take place.


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## Ahhzz (Mar 8, 2016)

just the thought of how much is out there about which we'll never know....


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## Drone (Mar 8, 2016)

Kip Thorne lectures (streamable and downloadable)

http://elmer.tapir.caltech.edu/ph237/week1/week1.html
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~kip/scripts/lectures.html











A short video with Rashid Sunyaev on the fate of Milky Way, Andromeda and Solar System


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## Drone (Mar 10, 2016)

Using data from almost one billion stars, National Science Foundation funded researchers created a 3D map of interstellar dust across 3/4 of the visible sky.

[Dust only makes up ~ 1% of the interstellar medium].

As Carl Sagan famously said, "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff."

See the videos of 3D dust mapping here:

http://argonaut.skymaps.info/


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## Drone (Mar 11, 2016)

Galaxy clusters are enormous collections of hundreds or even thousands of galaxies and vast reservoirs of hot gas embedded in massive clouds of dark matter, invisible material that does not emit/absorb light but can be detected through its gravitational effects.

To learn more about clusters, including how they grow via collisions, astronomers have used some of the world's most powerful telescopes, looking at different types of light. They have focused long observations with these telescopes on a half-dozen galaxy clusters. The name for this galaxy cluster project is the “Frontier Fields.”







*Located ~ 4.3 billion ly from Earth, MACS J0416 is a pair of colliding galaxy clusters that will eventually combine to form an even bigger cluster. MACS J0717, one of the most complex and distorted galaxy clusters known, is the site of a collision between 4 clusters. It is located ~ 5.4 billion ly away from Earth.*

These new images of MACS J0416 and MACS J0717 contain data from three different telescopes: NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (diffuse emission in blue), Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, and blue), and the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) (diffuse emission in pink). Where the X-ray and radio emission overlap, the image appears purple. Astronomers also used data from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India to study the properties of MACS J0416.

The Chandra data shows gas in the merging clusters with temperatures of millions of degrees. The optical data shows galaxies in the clusters and other, more distant, galaxies lying behind the clusters. Some of these background galaxies are highly distorted because of gravitational lensing, the bending of light by massive objects. This effect can also magnify the light from these objects, enabling astronomers to study background galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to detect. Finally, the structures in the radio data trace enormous shock waves and turbulence. The shocks are similar to sonic booms, generated by the mergers of the clusters.

*MACS J0416*

An open question for astronomers about MACS J0416 has been: are we seeing a collision in these clusters that is about to happen or one that has already taken place? Until recently, scientists have been unable to distinguish between these two explanations. Now, the combined data from these telescopes is providing new answers.

In MACS J0416 the dark matter (which leaves its gravitational imprint in the optical data) and the hot gas (detected by Chandra) line up well with each other. This suggests that the clusters have been caught before colliding. If the clusters were being observed after colliding, the dark matter and hot gas should separate from each other, as seen in the famous colliding cluster system known as the Bullet Cluster.

The cluster in the upper left contains a compact core of hot gas, most easily seen in a specially processed image, and also shows evidence of a nearby cavity, or hole, in the X-ray emitting gas. The presence of these structures also suggests that a major collision has not occurred recently; otherwise these features would likely have been disrupted. Finally, the lack of sharp structures in the radio image provides more evidence that a collision has not yet occurred.

In the cluster located in the lower right, the observers have noted a sharp change in density on the southern edge of the cluster. This change in density is most likely caused by a collision between this cluster and a less massive structure located further to the lower right.

*MACS J0717*

In VLA images of this cluster, 7 gravitationally-lensed sources are observed, all point sources or sources that are barely larger than points. This makes MACS J0717 the cluster with the highest number of known lensed radio sources. Two of these lensed sources are also detected in the Chandra image. The researchers are only aware of two other lensed X-ray sources behind a galaxy cluster.

All of the lensed radio sources are galaxies located between 7.8-10.4 billion ly from Earth. The brightness of the galaxies at radio wavelengths shows that they contain stars forming at high rates. Without the amplification by lensing, some of these radio sources would be too faint to detect with typical radio observations. The two lensed X-ray sources detected in the Chandra images are likely active galactic nuclei (AGN) at the centers of galaxies. AGN are compact, luminous objects powered by gas heated to millions of degrees as it falls toward supermassive black holes. These two X-ray sources would have been detected without lensing but would have been two or three times fainter.

The large arcs of radio emission in MACS J0717 are very different from those in MACS J0416 because of shock waves arising from the multiple collisions occurring in the former object. The X-ray emission in MACS J0717 has more clumps because there are 4 clusters violently colliding.


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## Drone (Mar 11, 2016)

2 pretty interesting videos from Hubble Space Telescope channel about colliding galaxies and Universe



















and 2 cool videos about IR light and EM spectrum


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## Drone (Mar 12, 2016)

A research team using ALMA has detected the *faintest millimeter-wave source ever observed*.

The Universe looks dark in the parts between stars and galaxies. However, astronomers have found that there is faint but uniform light, called the “cosmic background emission,” coming from all directions. This background emission consists of 3 main components; *Cosmic Optical Background (COB), Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB)*. The COB comes from a huge number of stars, and the CMB comes from hot gas just after the Big Bang. However, the origin of the CIB was still to be solved.

The team discovered 133 faint objects, including an object 5 times fainter than any other ever detected. The researchers found that the entire CIB can be explained by summing up the emissions from such objects.

What is the nature of those sources? By comparing the ALMA data with the data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Subaru Telescope, the team found that 60% of them are galaxies which can also be seen in the optical/infrared images. Dust in galaxies absorbs optical/infrared light and re-emits the energy in longer mm waves which can be detected with ALMA.






“However, we have no idea what the rest of them are. I speculate that they are galaxies obscured by dust. _Considering their darkness, they would be very low-mass galaxies_.” Masami Ouchi explained passionately. “_This means that such small galaxies contain great amounts of dust. That conflicts with our current understanding: small galaxies should contain small amounts of dust_. Our results might indicate the existence of many unexpected objects in the distant Universe. We are eager to unmask these new enigmatic sources with future ALMA observations”.


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## Drone (May 16, 2016)

Researchers at the University of Alabama-Huntsville analyzed X-ray emissions of more than 300 galaxy clusters in an attempt to learn more about dark matter and dark energy. It turns out that the emission profiles and sizes happened to be the same. To explain the significance of the finding, lead cosmologist of the study Andrea Morandi joins RT America's Manila Chan.


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## Drone (May 21, 2016)

An international team of scientists has detected and confirmed the *faintest early-Universe galaxy ever* using the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit on Maunakea, Hawaii.

The detection was made using the DEIMOS instrument fitted on the 10-m Keck II telescope, and was made possible through a phenomenon predicted by Einstein in which an object is magnified by the gravity of another object that is between it and the viewer. In this case, the detected galaxy was behind the galaxy cluster MACS2129.4-0741, which is massive enough to create 3 different images of the object [the light from this galaxy was magnified by factors of 11, 5 and 2].

The team detected the galaxy as it was *13 billion years ago*, or when the Universe was a toddler on a cosmic time scale. It lies near the end of the *reionization epoch*, during which most of the hydrogen gas between galaxies transitioned from being mostly neutral to being mostly ionized (and lit up the stars for the first time).




Three spectra of the multiply imaged systems have peaks at the same wavelength, hence showing that they belong to the same source.


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## dont whant to set it"' (May 21, 2016)

But those three graphs ar nothing alike, I fail to see how the sample at witch they were compiled might indicate that,also  that huge discrepancy in its positions due gravity lensing that much? I'l go read the arcticle now.


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## Drone (May 21, 2016)

Do you even know how gravitational lensing works ...


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## dont whant to set it"' (May 21, 2016)

Yes; yet that picture looks like I'm seeing triple as if seeing it stupidly drunk, there are quite big offsets from single point observations, that might be because I missed the arc/sec scale on the picture or lack thereoff.
Got it : thats a composite of two observations with 100k years inbetween, but dont hold me on that.
Anyways, at ~13By would give an augmented distance today of what 30-40Bly?


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## Drone (May 21, 2016)

Offsets are inevitable because of warped space around massive galaxy cluster.

Do you mean _proper_ distance? Yes, _proper_ distance is < 40 Gly (comoving distance is 13 Gly)


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## Drone (Jun 2, 2016)

As the most abundant element in the Universe and the raw fuel for creating stars, *hydrogen* is used by radio astronomers to detect and understand the makeup of other galaxies. An international team of scientists has pushed the limits of radio astronomy to detect a faint signal emitted by hydrogen gas in a *galaxy > 5 billion ly away*-almost double the previous record.






Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy with overlay of the hydrogen emission that was recently discovered.


*******************

A multinational team of astronomers have found a new Einstein Ring, a rare image of a distant galaxy lensed by gravity.
Light arriving at the Earth today left the Einstein ring 8 billion years ago, so we see the ring as it was 5 billion years after the Big Bang. Despite its relatively small apparent size (it stretches across an angle on the sky of 4.5 arcseconds or ~ 1/800th of a degree), it's larger than most of the other rings found to date.






In this color composite image, the central lensing galaxy is shown in red and the blue Einstein ring, the distorted image of a distant galaxy, is visible all around it.


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## Drone (Jul 12, 2016)

A new study of the early Universe reveals how it could have been formed from an older collapsing universe, rather than being brand new.

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_30-6-2016-14-4-5
https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/news/big-bang-or-big-bounce


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## Drone (Jul 17, 2016)

South African super telescope finds hundreds of previously undetectable galaxies


MeerKAT's images, taken of a patch of sky covering < 0.01% of the total, reveal > 1300 galaxies in the distant universe, where only ~ 70 had been previously detected.






In this image taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope, we see a galaxy ~ 200 million ly away where hydrogen gas is being used up to form stars in large numbers.






A "Fanaroff-Riley Class 2" (FR2) object: a massive black hole in the distant universe (matter falling into it produces the bright dot at the center) launching jets of powerful electrons moving at close to the speed of light.


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## Drone (Aug 21, 2016)

New video. How surprising, Einstein is always right lol


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## Drone (Aug 24, 2016)

Today's really insane day. First we're told that there's a potentially habitable planet right under our noses and now this:

The international University of California, Riverside-led SpARCS collaboration has discovered 4 of the most distant clusters of galaxies ever found, as they appeared when the Universe was only 4 billion years old.

Clusters are rare regions of the Universe consisting of hundreds of galaxies containing trillions of stars, as well as hot gas and mysterious Dark Matter. Spectroscopic observations from the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile confirmed the 4 candidates to be massive clusters. This sample is now providing the best measurement yet of when and how fast galaxy clusters stop forming stars in the early Universe.

*The study found that ~ 30% of the galaxies which would normally be forming stars have been quenched in the young distant clusters, compared to the much higher value of ~ 50% found in much older nearby clusters*.

While it had been fully expected that the percentage of cluster galaxies which had stopped forming stars would increase as the Universe aged, this latest work quantifies the effect.






Color images of the central regions of z > 1.35 SpARCS clusters. Cluster members are marked with white squares.


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## Drone (Aug 25, 2016)

*Scientists discover a galaxy that's 99.99% Dark Matter*

Whatta 






Even though it's relatively nearby, astronomers had missed the galaxy, named Dragonfly 44, for decades because it's very dim.

It has so few stars that it would quickly be ripped apart unless something was holding it together. Motions of the stars tell you how much matter there is. They don't care what form the matter is, they just tell you that it's there. The faster the stars move, the more mass their galaxy will have.

The Gemini data show that a relatively large fraction of the stars are in the form of very compact clusters.

*Dragonfly 44's mass is estimated to be 1 trillion times the mass of the Sun, or 2 tredecillion kg (a 2 followed by 42 zeros), which is similar to the mass of the Milky Way. However, only 0.01% of that is in the form of stars and “normal” matter. The other 99.99% is in the form of dark matter*.

Source 1: Gemini

Source 2: Yale University

Source 3: Keck Observatory


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## Drone (Aug 31, 2016)

This image contains the *most distant galaxy cluster*, a discovery made using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other telescopes. The galaxy cluster, known as *CL J1001+0220, is located ~ 11.1 billion ly from us* and may have been caught right after birth, a brief, but important stage of cluster evolution never seen before.

In addition to its extraordinary distance, CL J1001 is remarkable because of its high levels of star formation in galaxies near the center of the cluster. Within ~ 250000 ly of the center of the cluster (its core), 11 massive galaxies are found and 9 of those display high rates of formation. Specifically, *stars are forming in the cluster core at a rate equivalent to ~ 3400 Suns per year*.

These results suggest that elliptical galaxies in clusters may form their stars through more violent and shorter bursts of star formation than elliptical galaxies outside clusters.


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## Drone (Sep 1, 2016)

An international team of astronomers, including Carnegie's Eric Persson, has charted the rise and fall of galaxies over 90% of cosmic history.

The FourStar Galaxy Evolution Survey (ZFOURGE) has built a multicolored photo album of galaxies as they grow from their faint beginnings into mature and majestic giants. They did so by measuring distances and brightnesses for > 70000 galaxies spanning >12 billion years of cosmic time, revealing the breadth of galactic diversity.

Perhaps the most surprising result is that *galaxies in the young Universe appear as diverse as they are today*, when the Universe is older and much more evolved.

10 billion years ago, galaxies like our Milky Way were much smaller, but they were forming stars 30 times faster than they are today.


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## Drone (Sep 5, 2016)




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## Drone (Sep 23, 2016)

Pretty informative video from The Guardian 










Cool videos by Royal Museums Greenwich


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## Drone (Sep 24, 2016)

New theory:










Some TED-Ed stuff:


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## Drone (Oct 2, 2016)

Universe and General Relativity videos


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## Drone (Oct 13, 2016)

Ahahaha     I can't ..

Two days ago I was like "wow I'm 10 times smarter!!!" and now this ...


*Observable Universe contains 10 times more galaxies than previously thought*













Video and article by ESA/Hubble










Download original image ~ 1 GB


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## CAPSLOCKSTUCK (Oct 13, 2016)

Drone said:


> Observable Universe contains 10 times more galaxies than previously thought




mindblowing.......bring on the James Webb.


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## Drone (Oct 24, 2016)




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## Drone (Oct 29, 2016)

The Universe's just throwing curves and I'm watching more videos and reading more stuff


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## Drone (Oct 31, 2016)

Higher dimensions, megaverse and more ...


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## 64K (Oct 31, 2016)

Drone said:


> Higher dimensions, megaverse and more ...



I really enjoyed Tyson's Cosmos series. It's a shame that the series got discontinued.


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## Drone (Oct 31, 2016)

64K said:


> I really enjoyed Tyson's Cosmos series. It's a shame that the series got discontinued.


Indeed, NdGT's Cosmos is as good as Sagan's Cosmos. I enjoy both films, can watch them forever. Much better than stupid tv shows where people constantly interrupt him with lame jokes and crap.


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## Drone (Nov 2, 2016)




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## Drone (Nov 2, 2016)

Roger Penrose wrote a new book called
*Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe
*
Roger Penrose is definitely one of the most brilliant mathematical physicists ever. He always has some awesome explanations for things that aren't easily understood 
*
*
Brand new video by Oxford Mathematics












edit: so cool, I found a downloadable 720p video 

edt2: and all other his lectures here


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## Steevo (Nov 2, 2016)

A recent revival of the idea that dark matter/spacetime is the reason for the speed of light being what it is, the fastest a photon can travel through a medium (aether/spacetime is dark matter?, but not in the MM experiment sense) that we can not directly observe or measure other than by the speed of light itself. If my comment seems random its only as its interrelated to some of the videos you have posted.


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## Drone (Nov 3, 2016)

@Steevo Interesting, have a link?

Brian Greene










PBS




















Dark Matter vs Dark Energy: The Difference Explained
video by Gresham College










I've added some videos to post #153. Interesting that in the second video posted in May 2012 NdGT said that Milky Way is one of the hundred billion galaxies, now we know it's one of the _thousand_ billion galaxies


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## Drone (Nov 10, 2016)

Brilliant videos form the Economist, PBS and Perimeter Institute for people who actually care about this kind of things:



















Kepler-452b is actually ~ _1400_ ly away, in the constellation Cygnus


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## Drone (Nov 10, 2016)

Good old videos with Brian Greene


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## Drone (Nov 11, 2016)

What is time? Hell if I know XD


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## Ahhzz (Nov 11, 2016)

Time doesn't pass. It's just our way of measuring entropy


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## Drone (Nov 11, 2016)

Ahhzz said:


> Time doesn't pass. It's just our way of measuring entropy


Nice point but there's a good article in Scientific American which makes everything look more complicated.

They ask really interesting question:

In the evolution of cosmic structure, is entropy or gravity the more dominant force? The answer to this question has deep implications for the Universe's future, as well as its past. Arthur Eddington coined the term 'arrow of time', and famously said "the shuffling of material and energy is the only thing which nature cannot undo".
But here we are, showing beyond any doubt that this is in fact exactly what gravity does. It takes systems that look extraordinarily disordered and makes them wonderfully ordered. And this is what has happened in our Universe. We are realizing the ancient Greek dream of order out of chaos.


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## Drone (Nov 25, 2016)

Some think that Universe is a simulation ... ughm okay ..










Others say that entire Universe could be one giant alien ... Can you imagine that?










And here's some real science (old video though)


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## Drone (Nov 27, 2016)

Recent lectures with Kip Thorne

Big Bang, Black Holes, Gravitational Waves


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## Drone (Dec 8, 2016)

Professor Joseph Silk embarks on an illustrious journey through the universe to explain the paradigm shift in todays scientific view on the physical expansion of space

Download 1080p version here


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## Drone (Dec 11, 2016)




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## Drone (Dec 12, 2016)

Futurism


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## Drone (Dec 20, 2016)

Nice info on LIGO/LISA/Gravitational Waves

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/gw-sources
http://lisa.nasa.gov/faq.html

Kip Thorne lecture


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## Drone (Dec 29, 2016)

Gravitational Waves: The biggest science story of 2016 (videos by RT America)



















Meet the Team of Scientists Who Discovered Gravitational Waves (Smithsonian Magazine)


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## Drone (Jan 11, 2017)

Awesome (but not really new) lectures by Hitoshi Murayama and Joseph Polchinski





























MP4 videos and MP3 audios can be downloaded below:

http://www.uctv.tv/shows/E-mc2-11026
http://www.uctv.tv/shows/Spacetime-Versus-the-Quantum-30519
http://www.uctv.tv/shows/Space-Time-Versus-the-Quantum-30118

Credit: http://www.uctv.tv

Juan Maldacena

https://www.physics.harvard.edu/node/625

FermiLab lectures


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## Drone (Jan 22, 2017)




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## Drone (Feb 6, 2017)

*Discovered one of the brightest distant galaxies so far known






Massive lensing elliptical galaxy, at a distance of 5.4 billion ly, produces 4 distinct images of the distant galaxy, at 11.4 billion ly, with a flux which is 9 times bigger than it would be without this natural lens lying along the line of sight.*


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## Drone (Feb 14, 2017)

Two lectures by Kip Thorne in Cornell University

*100 Years of Relativity: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and 'Interstellar'*

*Probing the Warped Side of our Universe with Gravitational Waves and Computer Simulations

*
Download 1080p mp4 videos here

http://www.cornell.edu/video/kip-th...-black-holes-gravitational-waves-interstellar

http://www.cornell.edu/video/kip-thorne-probing-universe-gravitational-waves-computer-simulations


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## Drone (Mar 10, 2017)




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## Drone (Mar 12, 2017)




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## Drone (Mar 18, 2017)




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## Drone (Mar 28, 2017)




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## Drone (Mar 29, 2017)




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## Drone (Apr 1, 2017)




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## Drone (Apr 4, 2017)

new video w/ Lawrence Krauss

Big Bang Evidence: Frozen Higgs, Frozen Beer, and Gravity Waves


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## Drone (Apr 10, 2017)




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## Drone (Apr 20, 2017)




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## Drone (Apr 26, 2017)




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## Drone (May 13, 2017)

Did the Big Bang Break the Laws of Thermodynamics?
Distant Time and the hint of a Multiverse

w/ Sean Carroll


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## Drone (May 26, 2017)




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## NTM2003 (May 26, 2017)

Any idea what this alien megastructure is? They keep making shit up but really what could it be?


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## Drone (May 26, 2017)

They pointed telescopes there atm. They need more observation time to find out. Perhaps it's just a debris of comets/asteroids dimming that star. Alien megastructure explanation is ugh ... but I dunno anything is possible.


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## NTM2003 (May 26, 2017)

I really hope it is aliens but maybe we are better off alone lol but I know there's something out there may not be advance alien life but some kind of reptile looking things is my guess


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## Drone (May 26, 2017)

Yeah, everyone is _secretly_ hoping that it's aliens. Just like with those mysterious fast radio bursts. It's natural to think that we are not alone in the entire Universe.
I think that alien life forms look nothing like terrestrial life forms. I think it's something extremely exotic and unimaginable, maybe even not carbon based life.


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## NTM2003 (May 26, 2017)

Yea I'm sure we find something here soon hopefully


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## 64K (May 26, 2017)

I'm convinced that there are other lifeforms in our galaxy alone and certainly there must be in the entire Universe but there is no proof as yet. Possibly they already know about us but have quarantined our solar system because of our nature. It would probably be a bad thing for us if aliens did make contact with us since peaceful beings would avoid us for now. Sorry for the pessimism but look around the world and at our history.


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## NTM2003 (May 26, 2017)

The truth might already be out there we just don't know it yet the things our governments can hide you just never know.


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## dont whant to set it"' (May 26, 2017)

I wonder-ponder on the universe's expansion being within itself ,more or less the size before "Big Bang".


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## Drone (May 26, 2017)

Great question. If Big Bang is not the "beginning", there was vacuum which fluctuated and spawned the Big Bang. Then metastable sector of spacetime within that "hot soup" fluctuated and initiated Inflation (expansion). And so on. Basically Universes get created over and over again as one vacuum state jumps from one state into another. That's cyclic (oscillating) model aka inflationary cosmology. No beginning, no end, just endless cycle.

There are other models too which don't accept inflation.

Atm It's not possible to say who's wrong and who's right so standard model just says "ok let's accept Big Bang as "beginning" (not creation)". Without proper quantum gravity theory it won't be possible to answer these questions.


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## Drone (Jun 7, 2017)

*New video:


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## Drone (Aug 22, 2017)

Amazing lectures delivered by Roger Penrose



Cycles of Time: Is It Possible to Discern the Previous Universe Through the Big Bang?

(video by elementy.ru, Moscow (2013))










"Are we Seeing Signals from Before the Big Bang?" - Professor Sir Roger Penrose

(video by Oxford University Scientific Society, 2014)










The Cambridge Union (2013)


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## Drone (Dec 6, 2017)

Latest projects dedicated to dark matter


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## Drone (Apr 25, 2018)

Astronomers discover massive conglomerations of forming galaxies in the early Universe















Astronomers have used Hubble to make an incredible discovery — they have observed the most distant star ever seen.


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## Drone (May 1, 2018)

*How to build a dark matter detector*


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## Drone (May 16, 2018)

*ALMA Finds Most-Distant Oxygen in the Universe*

Galaxy 13.28 billion light-years away shows surprising signs of chemical maturity

https://public.nrao.edu/news/2018-alma-oxygen-iii/


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## Mr_Headshot (Mar 14, 2019)

Drone said:


> *Using the Subaru Telescope, a team of Japanese astronomers has discovered the most distant protocluster of galaxies ever found - one that existed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. The astronomers were able to directly observe this cluster of galaxies at an early stage in galaxy evolution, when structures were beginning to form in the early Universe. This discovery will be an important step on the way to understanding structure formation and galaxy evolution.*
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Here we are 7 years after the first post and now we've discovered a galaxy 13.2 BYO, another 500 million years back in space-time. 
https://www.space.com/30170-most-distant-galaxy-discovered.html


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## witkazy (May 3, 2019)

Long time ago in nebula far away stuff happened
https://cen.acs.org/physical-chemistry/astrochemistry/Universes-first-molecules-finally-found/97/i16


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## JovHinner123 (May 9, 2019)

witkazy said:


> Long time ago in nebula far away stuff happened
> https://cen.acs.org/physical-chemistry/astrochemistry/Universes-first-molecules-finally-found/97/i16


LOL that's one way to say it


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## witkazy (May 10, 2019)

JovHinner123 said:


> LOL that's one way to say it


That'is only way for non scholar enthusiast like myself .I am happy for them nerds , everyone deserves win once in a while


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## Drone (May 22, 2019)




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## Deleted member 67555 (May 22, 2019)

Drone said:


>


Imagine being a sentient life form witnessing the end of the Universe.

I heard a scientist say that the universe is infinite and it's so infinite that it will expand and contract so many times over trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years that everything that was or could have been will be.
That's an intense thought..
I could have made this very post countless times since the beginning of eternity.


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## Drone (May 22, 2019)

@jmcslob  many scenarios are possible, so many theories to check but if something is infinite it doesn't automatically mean that it can have everything. For example Penrose tiling is infinite but it never repeats or in Goodstein's theorem natural numbers can get insanely big but eventually collapse to zero.


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## Space Lynx (Jul 27, 2021)

@lexluthermiester  this is a good episode released today


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## lexluthermiester (Jul 27, 2021)

lynx29 said:


> @lexluthermiester  this is a good episode released today


"..print out Chuck Norris copies to take care of the dinosaur problem, very unsettling.." Good stuff!


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## Space Lynx (Jul 27, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> "..print out Chuck Norris copies to take care of the dinosaur problem, very unsettling.." Good stuff!



yeah I really love this guys youtube, his voice is interesting too, unique.  thanks for recommending him! I actually have been watching a lot of his backlog videos too, they are fascinating. well informed too, not just some armchair guy, he really takes it serious and you can tell its his passion.


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## dorsetknob (Aug 11, 2021)

Rare 'recurrent nova' visible to unaided eye in the constellation Ophiuchus​

RS Ophiuchi (RS Oph) is a recurrent nova system, located about 5 000 light-years away from Earth, with a recurrence rate of about 15 - 20 years.
Its last outburst took place in 2006.
The 2021 outburst was spotted by Keith Geary from Ireland at 21:55 UTC on August 8, when the brightening increased from magnitude +12 to +5 -- about 600-fold.

On August 10, variable star observer Filipp Romanov of Yuzhno-Morskoy, Russia, reported the magnitude has increased further to +4.6.









						Rare ‘recurrent nova’ visible to unaided eye in the constellation Ophiuchus
					

A rare 'recurrent nova' event is visible to the unaided eye in the constellation of Ophiuchus this week. RS Ophiuchi (RS Oph) is a recurrent nova system, located about 5 000 light-years away from…




					watchers.news


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## Drone (Aug 11, 2021)

> RS Ophiuchi is about 4566 ly away. It's a white dwarf with a red giant companion that dumps mass onto it.



Sounds good lol


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## Drone (Aug 18, 2021)




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## lexluthermiester (Sep 3, 2021)

Saw this and thought it fit in well here.








I would love to see a Supernova in my lifetime


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## dorsetknob (Sep 3, 2021)

lexluthermiester said:


> I would love to see a Supernova in my lifetime



Might Happen sooner than you think
"Quote"
A star is born! If you’ve followed my column, you may recall me saying that a new star will appear in the night sky.
This is exciting space news and worth sharing with more sky watch enthusiasts.
In 2022—only a few years from now—an odd type of *exploding star called a red nova will appear in our skies* in 2022. 
This will be the *first naked eye nova* in decades. And the mechanism behind it is fascinating as well.


This story really begins 10 years ago, when astronomers closely monitored a distant star in Scorpius. This was a double star where the two components were so close together they were actually touching. What was strange is that the orbital period was rapidly decreasing, strongly indicating that the stars might actually merge. Well, it really happened. In 2008, a red nova occurred in that spot, and afterward only one star remained. The two had merged.
Five years earlier, an astronomer predicted that a Red Nova is caused by the merger of stars in a binary system—so the 2008 Scorpius event confirmed that theory. 
And now it’s happening again. An astronomy professor at a small U.S. College, along with some of his students, predicted that the double star is just off the right wing tip of Cygnus the swan. From the way the orbit is speeding up from the current 11 hours, that Midwestern astronomer predicts they will merge in the year 2022, give or take half a year. It will be another red nova.


Because this star system is 1800 light years away, which is six times closer than that Scorpius star, the *nova should be bright enough to be seen with the naked eye

Source https://www.almanac.com/new-star-night-sky-2022*


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## lexluthermiester (Sep 3, 2021)

dorsetknob said:


> In 2022—only a few years from now—an odd type of *exploding star called a red nova will appear in our skies* in 2022.


I think that one was altered after Nasa did some research...








						Two Stars Won't Collide Into a Red Nova in 2022 After All
					

We're disappointed, too.




					www.discovermagazine.com
				




However, I was talking about one of those spectacular, "brighter than a full moon", "so bright you can see it during the day" types of SuperNova.

Red novae are scientifically fasinating, but they are visual non-starters for everyone who doesn't have a 1meter+ telescope.


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## Drone (Sep 6, 2021)

Hubble Discovers Hydrogen-Burning White Dwarfs Enjoying Slow Aging (hubblesite.org)


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## Space Lynx (May 20, 2022)

Hubble Reaches New Milestone in Mystery of Universe's Expansion Rate
					

Completing a nearly 30-year marathon, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has calibrated more than 40 "milepost markers" of space and time to help scientists precisely measure the expansion rate of the universe.




					www.nasa.gov
				




_Given the large Hubble sample size, there is only a one-in-a-million chance astronomers are wrong due to an unlucky draw, said Riess, a common threshold for taking a problem seriously in physics. This finding is untangling what was becoming a nice and tidy picture of the universe's dynamical evolution. Astronomers are at a loss for an explanation of the disconnect between the expansion rate of the local universe versus the primeval universe, but the answer might involve additional physics of the universe._

To sum it all up, just as I predicted over ten years ago, we actually have no idea about the expansion rate of the universe (the data shows its not true closer to the big bang point now). Just as I also predicted many years ago the Big Bang Theory is mostly incorrect and JWST will probably prove that very soon. How easily scientists yell fact, then how easily they remind the public well facts can change with new data.... hehehe


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## lexluthermiester (May 20, 2022)

CallandorWoT said:


> Hubble Reaches New Milestone in Mystery of Universe's Expansion Rate
> 
> 
> Completing a nearly 30-year marathon, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has calibrated more than 40 "milepost markers" of space and time to help scientists precisely measure the expansion rate of the universe.
> ...


I think you might be misunderstanding what NASA is saying in that article. It's not that we can't confirm that the Universe is expanding, instead it's that we are observing a rate that differs from the rate predicted by General & Special Relativity. Given that G&SR predicts many other things that observations contradict, this is one step further in promoting the fact that G&SR is either flawed or wrong. The Universe continues on it's merry way regardless of our predictions, so either our predictions are wrong or the Universe is misbehaving(BAD Universe, NAUGHTY Universe!!)... Which scenario is more likely?


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## Space Lynx (May 20, 2022)

lexluthermiester said:


> I think you might be misunderstanding what NASA is saying in that article. It's not that we can't confirm that the Universe is expanding, instead it's that we are observing a rate that differs from the rate predicted by General & Special Relativity. Given that G&SR predicts many other things that observations contradict, this is one step further in promoting the fact that G&SR is either flawed or wrong. The Universe continues on it's merry way regardless of our predictions, so either our predictions are wrong or the Universe is misbehaving(BAD Universe, NAUGHTY Universe!!)... Which scenario is more likely?



from what I read its a specific section closer to the center of the big bang, and that part is not expanding as much as the math should say it should. imo that is a pretty big flaw.

personally I think the Cosmos is so massive and complicated it requires a bit of hubris for any of us to claim we know what is going on in a fact based way.


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## lexluthermiester (May 20, 2022)

CallandorWoT said:


> personally I think the Cosmos is so massive and complicated it requires a bit of hubris for any of us to claim we know what is going on in a fact based way.


Can't disagree with that point considering that we can not observe what is going on outside our Universe in the Cosmos at large. We can't even observe the rest of what's inside our Universe due to the limitations of lightspeed. There are entire sections of the Universe that we can no longer observe because they have expanded away from us so far that light from those area's of the Universe can never reach us because we are accelerating away from each other at a rate greater than the speed of light. What I'm waiting to see is JWT take an image of a Galaxy on the very edge of our observational range fade from view as it moves beyond our observational range, never to be seen again. That will be an interesting day.


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## r9 (May 20, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> current data suggests that the universe is flat, there is a certain amount of measuring error, which could mean that the universe is just really really big, so the local curvature we see is too small to detect it (like the earth looks flat to you).
> 
> expanding universe means the space _between_ galaxies expands. objects that are gravitationally bound like our whole galaxy, the atoms of the earth, the atoms in your body, their electrons, do not move apart from each other.
> 
> a popular example to illustrate expanding universe is a balloon with dots painted on it (galaxies), and the balloon gets inflated, so the space between all points expands. a more accurate representation would be to glue some colored paper dots on it (so those won't expand)


In the next update of the simulation it will be 3D.
It's same like the old games where the background was just 2D texture.


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## Space Lynx (Jun 9, 2022)

__
		https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/v8bvff

More than 20 amino acids found in samples from Ryugu asteroid | NHK WORLD-JAPAN News​
the reddit post has the direct link to the Japanese website too

Hideo Kojima has also tweeted about it too   very cool news

@lexluthermiester


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## Steevo (Jun 9, 2022)

Voyager - Engineers Investigating NASA's Voyager 1 Telemetry Data
					





					voyager.jpl.nasa.gov
				




Speaking of things far away

Maybe Voyager 1 has reached the edge of our simulation


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 9, 2022)

CallandorWoT said:


> __
> https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/v8bvff
> 
> More than 20 amino acids found in samples from Ryugu asteroid | NHK WORLD-JAPAN News​
> ...


This shows that the building blocks of life seem to be abundant, which gives some momentum to the theory that life can spring up easily and is very common in the universe.


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## Courier 6 (Jun 9, 2022)

John Michael Godier  --> https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnMichaelGodier

Event Horizon -->  https://www.youtube.com/c/EventHorizonShow


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## Space Lynx (Jun 17, 2022)

Behold the Magnetar, nature’s ultimate superweapon
					

Their magnetic fields—the strongest we've observed—could melt you from 1,000 km away.




					arstechnica.com
				




Magnetars are more badass than I realized, black holes ain't got **** on magnetars!!!       

I want to see a show down, a collision between a black hole and magnetar, who wins?  Or would it shred the existence of reality as we know?  @lexluthermiester


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## Shrek (Jun 17, 2022)

A black hole is untouchable, it wins.


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## Space Lynx (Jun 17, 2022)

Shrek said:


> A black hole is untouchable, it wins.



Do we actually know this for sure though? Has a magnetar ever been observed close to a black hole?


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## Shrek (Jun 17, 2022)

According to our present understanding the area of the event horizon can only grow.


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## Space Lynx (Jun 17, 2022)

Shrek said:


> According to our present understanding the area of the event horizon can only grow.



Something must defeat a black hole though, otherwise, why wouldn't the black hole expand with compounding interest at each thing it gobbles up? Or do black holes stay the same size all the time unless they merge with another black hole?


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## Shrek (Jun 17, 2022)

Because it eats up its surrounds and that leaves nothing more for it to gobble; it defeats itself... until two galaxies collide... then it gets fed again...


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## ModEl4 (Jun 17, 2022)

I have some catching up to do, when I was in high school, it was the Big Bang *Theory*, I guess it's proven (somehow lol) in the last 20 years?


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## Shrek (Jun 17, 2022)

Nothing is proven in science, but there is a lot of evidence supporting the big bang.


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## DoH! (Jun 17, 2022)

Drone said:


> I didn't talk about light. They could travel towards primordial light
> What's q?


John de Lancie = 'Q'


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## ModEl4 (Jun 17, 2022)

So still a theory, huh?


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## Shrek (Jun 17, 2022)

There are no proofs in science, that is why mathematics is a separate discipline.


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## ModEl4 (Jun 17, 2022)

I prefer mathematics, probably less chance politics involved shape the whatever prevalent view.


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## Count von Schwalbe (Jun 18, 2022)

CallandorWoT said:


> Something must defeat a black hole though, otherwise, why wouldn't the black hole expand with compounding interest at each thing it gobbles up? Or do black holes stay the same size all the time unless they merge with another black hole?


Yes, but all gravity works that way. Universal expansion keeps them apart. 
I assume a black hole absorbs the energy a magnetar produces. I doubt the sub(sub?) atomic particles fused together could be pulled apart by even a magnetar's magnetic fields.


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 18, 2022)

CallandorWoT said:


> I want to see a show down, a collision between a black hole and magnetar, who wins?


Sherk is correct, a Black Hole would gobble up a magnetar is short order. Magnetars are a unique form of Neutron star. It's an expired stellar core that has not completely converted all of it's mass to neutrons. They also are generally thought to have very high rotational speeds, which is what would cause the extreme magnetic field generation. Another way of looking at a magnetar is that it is a star core that is spinning so quickly that centrifugal force prevents it from collapsing into a Black Hole. Once it slows down, collapse takes place and a new Black Hole is born.


CallandorWoT said:


> Do we actually know this for sure though?


Yes, we know this for certain. Nothing escapes a Black Hole once it crosses the event horizon.


CallandorWoT said:


> Has a magnetar ever been observed close to a black hole?


No, but the math is conclusive, Black Hole VS Magnetar = Black Hole + Magnetar = Black Hole with increased mass.


CallandorWoT said:


> Something must defeat a black hole though


No. That's not how a Black Hole works. A Black Hole is the end game.


CallandorWoT said:


> Or do black holes stay the same size all the time unless they merge with another black hole?


Black Holes increase in mass and physical size as they continue to absorb matter. The event horizon continues to expand proportionately as the mass increases and the force of gravity increases with it.



ModEl4 said:


> it was the Big Bang *Theory*, I guess it's proven (somehow lol) in the last 20 years?


Sort of. We have been able to map the movements of enough galaxies in enough places to show that all observable matter is expanding away from a central point that is well beyond our observable range. In other words, the Universe is MUCH larger than we can readily measure do to the limitations of the speed of light. So if all matter expanded from one point the theory of the Big Bang is correct on at least some level.


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## Count von Schwalbe (Jun 18, 2022)

lexluthermiester said:


> Sherk is correct, a Black Hole would gobble up a magnetar is short order. Magnetars are a unique form of Neutron star. It's an expired stellar core that has not completely converted all of it's mass to neutrons. They also are generally thought to have very high rotational speeds, which is what would cause the extreme magnetic field generation. Another way of looking at a magnetar is that it is a star core that is spinning so quickly that centrifugal force prevents it from collapsing into a Black Hole. Once it slows down, collapse takes place and a new Black Hole is born.


Per the link provided, it seems that they turn into a normal neutron star. The mass of black holes are much larger, as they come from larger stars. The difference between a neutron star and a magnetar comes simply from a magnetar being in a certain window of rotational speed when forming. I realize that this does not affect your point, just wanted to get it straight.


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 18, 2022)

Count von Schwalbe said:


> Per the link provided, it seems that they turn into a normal neutron star.


That is just one stage and is not all inclusive to the total lifespan of such an object.


Count von Schwalbe said:


> The mass of black holes are much larger, as they come from larger stars.


This is not always true. What causes matter to collapse into a "Black Hole" state is not the ultimate defined mass of an object but rather it is a balance of how much mass is compressed into a certain space. The causal factor of the creation of a Black Hole object is a factor of the force of gravity overcoming the the atomic forces keeping mass from collapsing in on itself. Once that balance shifts past a critical point, mass collapses into a Black Hole, regardless of the amount of mass in question.

Put another way: When gravity in a specific volume of space becomes great enough to over-power the forces keeping atoms from collapsing in on themselves, matter compresses and a Black Hole is created. 

The fundamental mechanic is the force of gravity within a specific volume of space, not the overall volume of mass. Example: Take the Earth. In it's current state, it can never collapse into a Black Hole. However, compress the all the mass of Earth down into the size of a golf ball and boom, you get a Black Hole with the mass of Earth. And because all of the mass is compressed to tightly in such a small space, that Black Hole will never explode back out. It will only ever consume matter from there forward. But remember, it still only has the same mass as Earth and thus the same gravity of Earth. So it will not collect mass at great rate than it would as it currently is. The difference would be that a Black Hole Earth would have an event horizon with no escape velocity. That event horizon would be very small, approx the size of a beach ball.  



Count von Schwalbe said:


> The difference between a neutron star and a magnetar comes simply from a magnetar being in a certain window of rotational speed when forming.


That's only part of the process. Magnetars must have amounts of non-neutron matter as a part of their mass structure, otherwise the ultra intense magnetic fields would not be possible. Neutron can created a magnetic field to a small degree, but not a powerful as non-neutron matter. This is why a Neutron Star can never be a Magnetar.


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## ModEl4 (Jun 18, 2022)

lexluthermiester said:


> So if all matter expanded from one point the theory of the Big Bang is correct on at least some level.


That's a big if.
It's just a theory, early days yet I suppose, I can't wait for the Big Bangs theory (all matter expanded from 2 antipodal points) just kidding!


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 18, 2022)

ModEl4 said:


> That's a big if.


Not an all. It's a logical and very reasonable conclusion.


ModEl4 said:


> It's just a theory, early days yet I suppose, I can't wait for the Big Bangs theory (all matter expanded from 2 antipodal points) just kidding!


I think your understanding of the fundamentals of the Big Bang need some revision.


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## Count von Schwalbe (Jun 18, 2022)

lexluthermiester said:


> That is just one stage and is not all inclusive to the total lifespan of such an object.
> 
> That's only part of the process. Magnetars must have amounts of non-neutron matter as a part of their mass structure, otherwise the ultra intense magnetic fields would not be possible. Neutron can created a magnetic field to a small degree, but not a powerful as non-neutron matter. This is why a Neutron Star can never be a Magnetar.


Here is the basis for my statements, from the article. Please feel free to correct me if they are wrong.



> If the neutron star is rotating fast enough (which can occur if its parent star was also rapidly spinning), the combination of fast spin, convection currents, and freely moving charges sets up a dynamo mechanism: the circulating electric charges generate a weak magnetic field. Then the motion of the convention cells causes the magnetic field to fold in over itself, which amplifies it. With every rotation, the magnetic field grows stronger.
> 
> Similar mechanisms happen inside the Earth's core to generate our magnetic field, just at much lower energies. With the energies involved in neutron stars, things can quickly spiral out of control.
> 
> ...





> Alas, like all good things, the party must come to an end. The extreme magnetic fields act as a drag, slowing down the spin of the magnetar and providing an avenue for energy to escape. Within about 10,000 years, a magnetar will turn into just another normal neutron star—still exotic but without that sharp magnetic edge.


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 18, 2022)

Count von Schwalbe said:


> Here is the basis for my statements, from the article. Please feel free to correct me if they are wrong.


That's more a description of the process. A Magnetar is a Neutron Star in the making. Magentars become Neutron Stars which over time and collection of more mass, become Black Holes.

It should be noted, not all Neutron Stars have strong magnetic fields and not all Magnetars will become Neutron Stars.


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## ModEl4 (Jun 18, 2022)

lexluthermiester said:


> Not an all. It's a logical and very reasonable conclusion.
> 
> I think your understanding of the fundamentals of the Big Bang need some revision.


The phrase I used usually has the meaning «that is not certain at all, implying also unlikeliness to happen» but I used it more in the sense that «it's both important and uncertain» maybe i misspoke and you reply that is a logical and very reasonable conclusion, from when something logical and reasonable constitute certainty?
Regarding understanding, maybe your understanding of «just kidding» needs a revision?


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 18, 2022)

ModEl4 said:


> The phrase I used usually has the meaning «that is not certain at all, implying also unlikeliness to happen» but I used it more in the sense that «it's both important and uncertain» maybe i misspoke and you reply that is a logical and very reasonable conclusion, from when something logical and reasonable constitute certainty?
> Regarding understanding, maybe your understanding of «just kidding» needs a revision?


This thread is a discussion about science, not ego. Let's remember to stay focused.


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## Space Lynx (Jun 18, 2022)

I know this thread is technically the wrong thread, but for those of you who only a "watch thread" a few of these space ones, this is just a friendly reminder July 12th we get the first images from the JWST.... really excited and nervous myself. Really it's more fascinating than landing a person on Mars imo... deep down, as humans I think we really want to know how far we can actually see, what's out there, exploration, more physics, etc. 

I am super tired at the moment, so apologies if my wording is off.


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## Shrek (Jun 18, 2022)

We live in exciting times.


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## Space Lynx (Jun 18, 2022)

Shrek said:


> We live in exciting times.



Honestly we really do, the fact civilization even works at its core level to allow something like the JWST is remarkable. It's amazing we have lasted this long honestly, with the way we behave as a species.


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