Outrageously old galaxy spied birthing new stars at furious rate Astronomers at the Max Planck institute have successfully glimpsed one of the oldest galaxies known to man, finally discovering how far away the primordial cluster is and explaining why it produces so many stars. The Hubble Deep Field, with the position of the submillimeter galaxy HDF850.1 marked with contour lines. The lines …
in that galaxy the Milkyway is 12.5 billion light years away and thus only 10% the age of the Universe. Now if the Milkyway is only 10% the age of the Universe why do we need to look at that galaxy to get an idea of what the Universe was like during it's early stages?
See the joke icon...Please don't try to explain relativity and the speed of light to me I know, I also know that all light hasn't aged one nano second since decoupling, where as I age 10 years every time the government announces one legislation ;-)
It's 12.5 billion light years away, we see it as it was 12.5 billion years ago. What we see is a very young galaxy. If it still exists, and hasn't been eaten by some enormous chocaholic, it is actually a very old galaxy.
Not taking the expansion of the Universe into account we will have to wait 12.5 billion years to know whether it exists now or not. However by then, presuming the human species hasn't evolved into a super-luminal energy field, we would probably be wondering if it exists then which in 12.5 billion years would be now. That would require waiting another 12.5 billion years...
There ya go that should clear things up ;-)
I'm not. 'Birth' as a veb is often used for the physical act of giving birth, e.g. as in 'birthing pool'. The verb 'bear' has the implied sense of carrying along a burden (joyfully we hope) during pregnancy and also supporting a child after the moment of it's birth.
As such, for inanimate objects such as stars, to say that a galaxy is 'birthing stars' seems fine to me.
This galaxy is 12.4 billion years away, ergo what we see now happened 12.4 billion years ago... so far so good... now why does elReg inist that the galaxy is 'producing' stars at an incredible rate? Surely it once 'produced' a lot of stars.. once upon a time in a universal location far far away, (from both our and its present location).. and may at this specific instant in time no longer even exist...
Saying this thing is 'producing' anything at all is actually total supposition because we know absolutely nothing about its true current state.
It's a standard way of talking about visual records. When you show a picture of a family gathering that was taken 10 years ago, do you say, "At the time this picture was taken, my brother was eating lots of cake", or do you say, "There's my brother, eating lots of cake."?
In my paper “Theoretical principle model of forces” (visit http://www.scienceau.com), I predicted that a galaxy only remains stable if it can achieve a continuing balance between matter and star densities and therefore must be finite (just as life spans of stars are finite).
The activity of HDF850.1 may the first example of a galaxy going through a ‘dying’ process. This will be analogous to the final nucleosynthetic phases of a dying star.
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