Discovery of 13.1 billion light years the most distant and ancient galaxy ... - Il Sole 24 Ore

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Into This entry was posted on October 23, 2013 at 19:04.
The final amendment of 23 October 2013 at 19:39.

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Into Aside from the horrible name, the galaxy is an extremely interesting, since it has been “photographed” while still working after only 700 million years after the Big Bang, which today stands at 13.8 billion years ago. Very little time spent on basic astronomy course, and yet it seems to be in full swing and indeed continuously form stars at a rate 150 times higher than that which we see today in our country.
To find it he took the best means available in space, the Hubble Space Telescope, and ground, the two twin 10-meter telescopes opening Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

With Into Space Telescope, the team selected a program called candels, 100,000 galaxies potential candidates to be among the most distant. From these, according to their color, they were then extracted only 43, which have been studied in detail one by one with the powerful ground-based telescopes, analyzing their light. The criterion of selection, very strict, was an extreme shift towards the red light radiation, the so-called red shift, that astrophysicists blame the expansion constant and even as accelerated Universe. The galaxy appears more red than what it should be and more distant, and in this sense, the light is red z8_GND_5296 like no other.
“The discovery is important and we need to plant another stake into the field knowledge of galaxy formation just after the Big Bang, “says Adriano Fontana,” indeed this is the closest to the Big Bang that we know yet is surprisingly rich in heavy elements. ” In practice, the surprise is due to the fact that after “only” 700 million years had evidently formed in this galaxy several generations of stars that had produced, one after the other, more complex chemical elements hydrogen. The beginning of time, in fact, it is thought there was only hydrogen and a little helium, and all the chemical elements that followed, of which we are composed, would be “manufactured” in the heart of the stars due to nuclear fusion reactions. Our sun, just to make a comparison, it is much, much slower: it is formed over 4 billion years ago and will go out among others 4.

Into All records are meant to be broken and that too sooner or later it will be. “Among the data that we have yet to analyze may also be a more distant galaxy and therefore the oldest of this,” concludes Fountain that is already allocated to the hunting of new candidates, and next spring will do so with LBT, the Large Binocular Telescope Italian -German-American. It is the largest existing binoculars with two 8-meter mirrors and passes opening, place on top of a mountain in Arizona. A jewel of Italian technology and machinery, we will see if the new record.

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