Walter Watts
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Puzzle of the Precocious Galaxies
« on: 2004-04-10 23:36:03 » |
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The observations came as a shock—
something like finding baby pictures
of your father and seeing that he
sported a mustache at age 2. When he
examined galaxies in the distant early
universe, astronomer Roberto Abra-
ham of the University of Toronto found
they were far more mature than ex-
pected. ‘Stars are forming in some way
that is inconsistent with our view of
how they should be forming,” he says.
Abraham’s team used the huge Gem-
ini North telescope in Hawaii to search
for extremely remote, old-looking galax-
ies whose reddish glow would have been
largely blotted out by Earth’s atmos-
phere. After 120 hours of observing, the
researchers detected more than 300
distant galaxies. Based on the objects’
size and color, many ol them formed
Just 1 billion years after the Big Bang,
far sooner than ow-rent models predict.
Meanwhile, Povilas Palunas of the
University of Texas at Austin and his
colleagues have detected a huge dump-
ing of galaxies at an even earlier era.
Theorists believe that dark matter pro-
vided the gravitational tug that allowed
such structures to arise, but nobody
can explain how it did the job so rapidly.
As Palunas puts it, “The universe is
growing up faster than we thought.”
—Corey S Powell with Kathy A. Svitil
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