Messages from the very beginning of the universe about how it began
| October 19, 2011 | Posted by News under Cosmology, News |
European Space Agency's Very Large Array,Chile
From “Ancient 13-Billion-Year-Old Galaxies Observed by VLT ‘Time Machine’” (The Daily Galaxy October 17, 2011), we learn,
An international team of astronomers used the VLT as a time machine, to look back into the early Universe and observe several of the most distant galaxies ever detected. They have been able to measure their distances accurately and find that we are seeing them as they were between 780 million and a billion years after the Big Bang.
The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is the flagship for European ground-based astronomy made up of four separate optical telescopes organized in an array formation, built and operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at the Paranal Observatory on Cerro Paranal, a 2,635 m high mountain in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.
One finding:
“We see a dramatic difference in the amount of ultraviolet light that was blocked between the earliest and latest galaxies in our sample,” says lead author Laura Pentericci of INAF Rome Astronomical Observatory. “When the Universe was only 780 million years old this neutral hydrogen was quite abundant, filling from 10 to 50% of the Universe’ volume. But only 200 million years later the amount of neutral hydrogen had dropped to a very low level, similar to what we see today. It seems that reionisation must have happened quicker than astronomers previously thought.”
7 Responses to Messages from the very beginning of the universe about how it began
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News,
One of the perils of taking a position is that sometimes you’ll get it wrong. ID does not suffer from that affliction.
Are you expecting a headline “It seems that age of the earth must be much younger than astronomers previously thought” at some point perhaps? I know outspoken ID proponents here like Kariosfocus (“were you there?”) and Joseph (“new things made from old materials look old”) won’t take a position on the age of the earth for various but ultimately spurious reasons but really? Is everybody here a young earther or what?
Wow KH, you sure read a lot into an OP that didn’t even contain commentary on the article or the findings.
I’m not a young earther.
Does that answer your question?
Not clear how you got that out of it, kellyhomes. It was a direct quote of one of the more interesting findings. Hard to see how it would affect the age of the Earth -a bit further up the pipe at this point.
Well, what it might be saying is that the dark matter is comets.
Their observation of galaxies showed there was less hydrogen around at 200M years from BB than expected. What was expected? Enough H2 to jumpstart the clumping of galaxies, so if there isn’t that much H2, why did all the galaxies start off with a bang? Sortoflike how do you get your car started without any gas in the tank?
Perhaps because it wasn’t the H2 that started the galaxies, but ices–H20, CO2, CO, NH3 etc. Ice tends to clump, clumps attract gravitationally, like seeding clouds with NaI.
Where did the comets come from? From Big Bang Nucleosynthesis of C, N, and O–far more than expected in current BBN models that don’t include magnetic fields.
And why is this important? Not just because it helps cosmologists improve their models, but because comets melt when they come near a sun, and melted comets have water, and water supports life, and life can spread from comet to comet, and the Universe comes alive. Pretty cool, huh?
Now Kelly if you reject the young earth model, as many IDers do for purely scientific reasons, then why don’t you go ahead and follow the scientific evidence all the way to where it leads and also reject materialism altogether since the universe had a creation event 13.7 billion years ago, and since quantum mechanics has shown the universe is not ‘self-sustaining’ with its falsification of local-realism/reductive materialism, and go ahead and accept the Old Earth model since that is where the evidence???
semi OT: Watch Oxford Mathematician John Lennox’s Response to Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design – exclusive video from ENV
http://www.discovery.org/v/2511