Heavyweight galaxies puzzle astronomers
April 2, 2009
An infrared image of the cluster XMMU J2235.3-2557 taken with Subaru, seen at a distance corresponding to 65% of the way back to the big bang. The image shows the central 1.5 x 1.5 arc min of the cluster corresponding to 0.75 Mpc at this distance. The clusters X-ray emission is used to pinpoint the location of the brightest galaxy in the cluster as shown by the green contours which represent the X-ray intensity as measured by the XMM-Newton X-ray satellite.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have discovered large galaxies some two thirds of the way back in time to the big bang. This surprising find casts doubt on theories of how the biggest galaxies form.
The conventional view is that the heaviest galaxies in the universe started out very small and light and have gained most of their weight relatively recently by cannibalising other galaxies that came too close. However, these new findings, to be published in Nature on 2nd April 2009, suggest that rather than being svelte, some galaxies in the distant past weighed just as much as the monsters we see in the universe today.
The discovery was made using one of the largest optical telescopes in the World, called Subaru (named after the Japanese word for the Pleiades star cluster), located on the Island of Hawaii and owned by the National Observatory of Japan.
Analysing the light from these remote galaxies, the astronomers at Liverpool John Moores University’s (LJMU) Astrophysics Research Institute have effectively weighed them and found that despite feeding on a constant diet of small galaxies, the heaviest galaxies have not increased their weight over the last nine billion years. In a universe whose age is 13.7 billion years old, these results spark a debate as to how these galaxies put on so much weight in the first few billion years after the big bang.
LJMU’s Professor Chris Collins and leader of the international team of astrophysicists who made the breakthrough said: “Current predictions using simulations run on super computers suggest that at such a young age these galaxies should be only 20% of their final weight, so to find galaxies so large suggests that galaxy formation is a much more rapid process than we previously thought and perhaps the theories are missing some important physics.”
Dr John Stott who carried out the analysis said: "We were surprised to find that the largest and brightest galaxies in the Universe have remained essentially unchanged for the last nine billion years, having grown rapidly soon after the Big Bang."
One possibility being considered is that the galaxies formed by the collapse of an already massive cloud at the dawn of the universe.
Provided by Science and Technology Facilities Council
Sep 21, 2005 |
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It could be way too early in the morning for me, but what is to say that they haven't enlarged. If we are looking 'back in time' because of the extreme distances and the finite speed of light, we can't simply look again the next night and see said galaxy as it is today. Am I missing something?
Sure I understand that the article is looking at these groups of galaxies that are larger than similar aged galaxies. All that says to me is that the current model does not yet explain everything that we have yet to discover.
A Commonsensible Recapitulation
A. "Heavyweight galaxies in the young universe"
http://www.scienc...universe
New observations of full-grown galaxies in the young universe may force astrophysicists to revise their leading theory of galaxy formation, at least as it applies to regions where galaxies congregate into clusters.
B. Some brief notes in "Light On Dark Matter?", at
http://www.physfo...ic=22994&st=0&#entry373127
- "Galaxy Clusters Evolved By Dispersion, Not By Conglomeration"
- Introduction of E=Total[m(1 D)]
- "Dark Energy And Matter And The Emperor's New Clothes"
- "Evolutionary Cosmology: Ordained Or Random"
- "%u201CMovie%u201D Of Microwave Pulse Transitioning From Quantum To Classical Physics"
- "Broken Symmetry" Is Physics' Term Of Biology's "Evolution"
- "A Glimpse Of Forces-Matter-Life Unified Theory"
C. Commonsensible conception of gravity
1. According to the standard model, which describes all the forces in nature except gravity, all elementary particles were born massless. Interactions with the proposed Higgs field would slow down some of the particles and endow them with mass. Finding the Higgs %u2014 or proving it does not exist %u2014 has therefore become one of the most important quests in particle physics.
However, for a commonsensible primitive mind with a commonsensible universe represented by
E=Total[m(1 D)], this conceptual equation describes gravity. It does not explain gravity. It describes it. It applies to the whole universe and to every and all specific cases, regardless of size.
2. Thus gravity is simply another face of the total cosmic energy. Thus gravity is THE cosmic parent of phenomena such as black holes and life. It is the display of THE all-pervasive-embracive strained space texture, laid down by the expanding galactic clusters, also noticed in the expanding energy backlashes into various constructs of temporary constrained energy packages.
3. "Extrapolation of the expansion of the universe backwards in time to the early hot dense "Big Bang" phase, using general relativity, yields an infinite density and temperature at a finite time in the past.
At age 10^-35 seconds the Universe begins with a cataclysm that generates space and time, as well as all the matter and energy the Universe will ever hold."
At D=0, E was = m and both E and m were, together, all the energy and matter the Universe will ever hold. Since the onset of the cataclysm E remains constant and m diminishes as D increases.
The increase of D is the inflation, followed by expansion, of what became the galactic clusters.
At 10^-35 seconds, D in E=Total[m(1 D)] was already a fraction of a second above zero. This is when gravity started. This is what started gravity. At this instance starts the space texture, starts the straining of the space texture, and starts the "space texture memory", gravity, that will eventually overcome expansion and initiate re-impansion back to singularity.
D. Commonsensible conception of the forces other than gravity
The forces other than gravity are, commonsensibly, forces involved in conjunction with evolution:
http://royalsocie...?id=4770
The farthest we go in reductionism in Everything, including in Life, we shall still end up with wholism, until we arrive at energy. Energy is the base element of everything and of all in the universe. At the beginning was the energy singularity, at the end will be near zero mass and an infinite dispersion of the beginning energy, and in-between, the universe undergoes continuous evolution consisting of myriad energy-to-energy and energy-to-mass-to-energy transformations.
The universe, and everything in it, are continuously evolving, and all the evolutions are intertwined.
Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
Life's Manifest
http://www.the-sc...page#578
EVOLUTION Beyond Darwin 200
http://www.physfo...ic=14988&st=405&#entry396201
http://www.the-sc...age#1407
As mass is just another face of energy it is commonsensible to regard not only life, but mass in general, as a format of temporarily constrained energy.
It therefore ensues that whereas the expanding cosmic constructs, the galaxies clusters, are - overall - continuously converting "their" original pre-inflation mass back to energy, the overall evolution within them, within the clusters, is in the opposite direction, temporarily constrained
energy packages are precariuosly forming and "doing best" to survive as long as "possible"...
Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
Heavyweight galaxies at long distances is a very interesting observation. I appreciate your posting of the arxiv information. Facts like these will surely lead to the conclusion that the Big Bang is not the correct model.
The big bang model fixed the initial creation of the universe into a single point in time and therefore causes the universe to have an age.
The heavyweight galaxies at long distance would not be surprising at all, if the commencement of the universe was not fixed by a big bang. In the case where the universe is a continuum of destruction and recreation of matter, It would be expected that such galaxies will indeed exist well beyond a distance of 14 billion light years which would put its existence before the big bang.
Would you have a problem explaining the existence of heavyweight galaxies at the observed distances, if the universe was a continuum, which limits the size of super-massive black holes to the size of galaxies you are comparing?
Would it be difficult to simulate the calculations based on a non expanding universe where red shift is the result of photon interaction with dark energy as proposed by Einstein s cosmological constant?
Cheers Zwei Stein