What does astronomer Garth Illingworth say as Hubble telescope snaps pictures of galaxies at birth?”
uly 30, 1997: An international team of astronomers has discovered the most distant galaxy in the universe to date. They found it by combining the unique sharpness of the Hubble telescope with the light-collecting power of the W. M. Keck Telescopes— with an added boost from a gravitational lens in space. The results show the young galaxy is as far as 13 billion light-years from Earth, based on an estimated age for the universe of approximately 14 billion years. The Hubble picture at left shows the young galaxy as a red crescent to the lower right of center. The galaxy’s image is brightened, magnified, and smeared into this arc-shape by the gravitational influence of an intervening galaxy cluster, which acts like a gigantic lens. The image at upper right is a close-up of the “gravitationally lensed” galaxy. In the picture at lower right, astronomers have “unsmeared” the galaxy, revealing the galaxy’s normal appearance. See the rest: * Release Text * See All the Images Q & A: Understandin
ReprintPrint Email Font Resize Universe’s baby pictures, courtesy of Hubble Telescope By Megha Satyanarayana – Santa Cruz Sentinel Posted: 01/05/2010 07:25:06 AM PST A team of astronomers, including some from UC Santa Cruz, have new photos of the Milky Way galaxy, when it was in preschool. With a new camera on the revamped Hubble Space Telescope, the scientists have discovered a batch of blue galaxies in deep space. It’s a snapshot of the estimated 13.7 billion-year-old universe at age 700 million, when say, an elderly man was just a little boy. “These objects are the seeds of galaxies, basically the building blocks of the Milky Way and Andromeda,” said Garth Illingworth, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. “Everything that makes the Earth hasn’t formed yet.” In August 2009, during a two-week stretch, the research team took images with the infrared wide A Hubble Telescope image of galaxies, including several blue galaxies that likely formed just 700 million years
WASHINGTON — Hubble astronomers unveiled a panoramic view Tuesday of the universe’s youngest galaxies, offering the earliest look yet at the puny predecessors to our own Milky Way. Galaxies are the islands of stars filling the cosmos. Large ones such as our own Milky Way galaxy span more than 100,000 light-years (nearly 600,000 trillion miles) and contain hundreds of billions of stars. “These are the seeds of later large galaxies like our own,” says astronomer Garth Illingworth of the University of California-Santa Cruz, speaking at the American Astronomical Society meeting. Filled with blue-tinted stars, these early galaxies are only one-twentieth the diameter and have just 1% of the mass of our own galaxy and later ones seen in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey panorama.
