The Way-Back Machine?
The Hubble Space Telescope.
It is peering way back to what the Universe looked like 13,000,000,000 years ago.
It's like time-travel -- without the confounding paradoxes. And we just simply have to look.
Bright ancient galaxies offer rare glimpse of early universe
by Amina Khan, therecord.com -- Jan 8, 2014
This image taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows some of the intrinsically faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected in visible light. (The Associated Press)
A quartet of galaxies spied with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are among the oldest yet discovered -- more than 13 billion years old, born just 500 million years after the big bang. They're also incredibly bright, so luminous that they offer a new peek into the early universe.
"When we look at these galaxies, we are using Hubble as a time machine," said study coauthor Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "These galaxies are almost primeval in a sense … We have to understand how (they) came about."
[...]
The four galaxies are roughly 20 times brighter than they ought to be, the researchers said. Their bluish light reveals that they're bursting with star formations -- the brightest one is producing stars 50 times faster than the Milky Way. If scientists were able to see them in real time, they would potentially dwarf Earth's galaxy, said lead author Pascal Oesch, an astronomer at Yale University.
[...]
It looks like the Universe have been in
the business of Galaxy-building for much of its 13.8 Billion-year existence.
Our Milky Way galaxy may turn out to be a run-of-the-mill event, as overwhelming as it may appear to us, mere humans -- on one of those dark and starry nights ...
The Milky Way Galaxy Exploding from Mount Rainier -- www.smithsonianmag.com
Readers' Choice Winner -- Smithsonian's 10th Annual Photo Contest Finalists
(Photo by David Morrow (Everett, Washington). Photographed at Sunrise Point in Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, October 6, 2012). Link to larger image.
The light from these distant-ancient galaxies is so dim -- that we ought not to be able to see them. Even with our most awesome Space Telescope.
However, you know those Scientists -- they don't just give up when they hear the words "we ought not to be able ..."
Hubble harnesses gravity to find dim, ancient galaxies near big bang
by Amina Khan, latimes.com -- Jan 8, 2014
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The Hubble Space Telescope has been looking deep into the distant reaches of the universe, because the longer the light has traveled, the older the image we see is -- and the closer to the big bang it must be. Scientists want to understand these galaxies and their stellar contents in order to better understand the origins of our universe, which was born 13.8 billion years ago.
But the light from these distant galaxies is incredibly faint -- so much so that, beyond a certain point, it’s difficult to pick it up in wavelengths beyond infrared. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope could potentially open up this time period in cosmic history, but that observatory won’t launch until 2018.
Luckily, astronomers can take advantage of a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Extremely massive objects can cause light to bend around them, just like a magnifying glass, making the objects appear many times brighter than they would normally -- and allowing astronomers to study objects that would be impossible to see otherwise.
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This long-exposure image of massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, is the deepest ever made of any galaxy cluster. It shows some of the faintest and earliest galaxies ever detected in space. (NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer, and the HFF Team (STScI)).
Science gotten us to where we are today, as limited as our progress currently may be.
And it will be Science that will get us to where we have to go -- assuming we as a Society, decide to give aspiring Scientists a fighting chance, to be all they can be. To do all that they can do.
Even when that means 'setting the dials' way-back beyond which they can normally go.
Afterall, aren't our 'cosmic speed limits' ... simply meant to be broken?