Looking Back In Time
October 21st 2010 04:38
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the faint object shown in the excerpt on the left is a galaxy when the Universe was only about 600 million years old
Looking back in time when the universe was at its infancy what do we see?
Those of us that are fortunate enough to get a clear view of the night sky , look up and perhaps wonder at the vast expanse of space. But we only get a glimpse at what’s really out there.
Every time we look at the night sky we are looking back in time as things were .
In the last few centuries with the advancement of more powerful telescopes and advanced technology we can look even further back in to the past.
Astronomers have looked back to find the most distant galaxy so far. With the aide of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope (VLT)
a galaxy that existed essentially when the Universe was only about 600 million years old.
we can now look back around 13 billion years ago when the universe was just a pup.
Using the observations by the Hubble telescope researchers looked at the very faint glow of the distant galaxy to measure its distance and the numbers were supprising.
We were looking at the light emitted from the reionization of the Universe. The reionization period is about the farthest back in time that astronomers can observe.
When the universe was created by the Big bang the universe was a very hot place, after some 400,000 years temperatures cooled, electrons and protons joined to form neutral hydrogen, and the hot gases dispersed.
Another billon years passed , neutral hydrogen began to form the genesis of stars that became the first galaxies.
Credit: NASA, ESA
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