{"id":11757,"date":"2015-11-18T07:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T12:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=11757"},"modified":"2015-11-16T12:16:11","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T17:16:11","slug":"11757","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=11757","title":{"rendered":"ESO: The birth of monster giant galaxies in the early universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new report from\u00a0ESO<\/a>\u00a0(European Southern Observatory):<\/p>\n

The Birth of Monsters<\/a>
\n<\/strong>VISTA pinpoints earliest giant galaxies<\/em><\/p>\n

ESO\u2019s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have, for the first time, found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
ESO\u2019s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have for the first time found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared. The newly discovered massive galaxies are marked on this image of the UltraVISTA field.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Just counting the number of galaxies in a patch of sky provides a way to test astronomers\u2019 theories of galaxy formation and evolution. However, such a simple task becomes increasingly hard as astronomers attempt to count the more distant and fainter galaxies. It is further complicated by the fact that the brightest and easiest galaxies to observe \u2014 the most massive galaxies in the Universe \u2014 are rarer the further astronomers peer into the Universe\u2019s past, whilst the more numerous less bright galaxies are even more difficult to find.<\/p>\n

A team of astronomers, led by Karina Caputi of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute<\/a> at the University of Groningen, has now unearthed many distant galaxies that had escaped earlier scrutiny. They used images from the UltraVISTA<\/a> survey, one of six projects using VISTA<\/a> to survey the sky at near-infrared wavelengths, and made a census of faint galaxies when the age of the Universe was between just 0.75 and 2.1 billion years old.<\/p>\n

UltraVISTA has been imaging the same patch of sky, nearly four times the size of a full Moon, since December 2009. This is the largest patch of sky ever imaged to these depths at infrared wavelengths. The team combined these UltraVISTA observations with those from the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope<\/a>, which probes the cosmos at even longer, mid-infrared wavelengths .<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe uncovered 574 new massive galaxies \u2014 the largest sample of such hidden galaxies in the early Universe ever assembled<\/em>,\u201d explains Karina Caputi. \u201cStudying them allows us to answer a simple but important question: when did the first massive galaxies appear?<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Imaging the cosmos at near-infrared wavelengths allowed the astronomers to see objects that are both obscured by dust, and extremely distant [2]<\/a>, created when the Universe was just an infant.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
ESO\u2019s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have for the first time found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared. A few of the newly discovered massive galaxies are shown in close-up on these small subsets of the UltraVISTA field.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The team discovered an explosion in the numbers of these galaxies in a very short amount of time. A large fraction of the massive galaxies we now see around us in the nearby Universe were already formed just three billion years after the Big Bang.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe found no evidence of these massive galaxies earlier than around one billion years after the Big Bang, so we\u2019re confident that this is when the first massive galaxies must have formed,<\/em>\u201d concludes Henry Joy McCracken, a co-author on the paper [4]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In addition, the astronomers found that massive galaxies were more plentiful than had been thought. Galaxies that were previously hidden make up half of the total number of massive galaxies present when the Universe was between 1.1 and 1.5 billion years old [5]<\/a>. These new results, however, contradict current models of how galaxies evolved in the early Universe, which do not predict any monster galaxies at these early times.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/cdn.eso.org\/videos\/medium_podcast\/eso1545a.m4v<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n

ESO\u2019s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have for the first time found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared.\u00a0The newly discovered massive galaxies are marked on this image of the UltraVISTA field.\u00a0Credit:\u00a0ESO\/UltraVISTA team. Acknowledgement: TERAPIX\/CNRS\/INSU\/CASU.\u00a0Music: Johan Monell\u00a0(www.johanmonell.com<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

To complicate things further, if massive galaxies are unexpectedly dustier in the early Universe than astronomers predict then even UltraVISTA wouldn\u2019t be able to detect them. If this is indeed the case, the currently-held picture of how galaxies formed in the early Universe may also require a complete overhaul.<\/p>\n

The Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA)<\/a> will also search for these game-changing dusty galaxies. If they are found they will also serve as targets for ESO\u2019s 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT<\/a>), which will enable detailed observations of some of the first ever galaxies.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>[1] ESO\u2019s VISTA telescope observed in the near-infrared wavelength range 0.88\u20132.15 \u03bcm while Spitzer performed observations in the mid-infrared at 3.6 and 4.5 \u03bcm.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[2] The expansion of space means that the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it appears to be speeding away from an observer on Earth. This stretching causes the light from these distant objects to be shifted into redder parts of the spectrum, meaning that observations in the near-to-mid infrared are necessary to capture the light from these galaxies.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[3] In this context, “massive” means more than 50 billion times the mass of the Sun. The total mass of the stars in the Milky Way is also close to this figure.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[4] The team found no evidence of massive galaxies beyond a redshift of 6, equivalent to times less than 0.9 billion years after the Big Bang.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[5] This is equivalent to redshifts between z=5 and z=4.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new report from\u00a0ESO\u00a0(European Southern Observatory): The Birth of Monsters VISTA pinpoints earliest giant galaxies ESO\u2019s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the Universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have, for the first time, found … Continue reading ESO: The birth of monster giant galaxies in the early universe<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s34aWK-11757","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8827,"url":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=8827","url_meta":{"origin":11757,"position":0},"title":"ESO: Possible explanation for why Milky Way-like galaxies are so common","author":"TopSpacer","date":"September 16, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"A report from the European Southern Observatory (ESO): Violent Origins of Disc Galaxies Probed by ALMA New observations explain why Milky Way-like galaxies are so common in the Universe For decades scientists have believed that galaxy mergers usually result in the formation of elliptical galaxies. 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