Hubble Finds Oldest-Known Galaxy

FOX News By JEFFREY KLUGER Jeffrey Kluger – Sat Jan 29, 12:05 am ET

Somewhere out in the void - about 13.2 billion light-years away, give or take - is a magnificent red blob that was recently discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope. It's a galaxy - or at least it was; it has long since flashed out of existence - but it is far less beautiful or dramatic than nearly any galaxy the Hubble has spotted before. Its magnificence, instead, comes from its age.

The newly discovered star cluster - a hundred times smaller than our Milky Way - was formed just 480 million years after the 13.7 billion-year-old universe was born, making it the oldest galaxy ever found. As such, it provides astronomers with a first-time glimpse at the universe in its R&D phase, when small, sloppy galaxies were being formed out of hot gas, only to vanish shortly afterward - leaving the skies free for the huge and mature galactic swirls that would come along later. (See "The Hubble Space Telescope's Greatest Hits.")

Reported in this week's edition of Nature, the galaxy - known, unpoetically, as UDFj-39546284 - had long escaped the Hubble's gaze, and that's no wonder. Even at its best, the 20-year-old telescope never had the acuity to peer so far into space, where the rapid expansion of the universe causes light waves to shift to a deep red. It was only after Hubble's May 2009 upgrade that its Ultra Deep-Field Infrared imager went online. Ultra-deep infrared is exactly what was needed to spot something like UDFj-39546284, but even then, it took about 100 hours of observing time spread across the summers of 2009 and 2010 for the galaxy to be fully visually resolved. (Comment on this story.)

When it was, the findings revealed a lot. The galaxy - or mini-galaxy, as NASA is calling it - is thought to have been just 100 million to 200 million years old when its light began the 13.2 billion light-year journey to Hubble's lens. Its size, shape and the era in which it formed all suggest that it began its life as a mass of gas trapped in a pocket of dark matter - a little like a slosh of tea pooling in the depression of a saucer. (See pictures of five different space programs.)

"We're peering into an era where big changes are afoot," says astronomer and astrophysicist Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, a co-author of the paper.

The changes were big indeed, but they unfolded slowly. In those early days, stars took about 10 times as long to form as they did in later epochs. When they did form, they were typically part of the blue star class - huge, extremely hot stars, heavy on helium, oxygen and nitrogen. Blue stars are fuel gluttons, lasting only a few million years before ending their lives in massive explosions. (See a brief history of the Hubble Space Telescope.)

It would not be long before stabler, faster-forming stars began popping into being in much larger galaxies as the universe rapidly cooled. Between 480 million and 700 million years after the Big Bang - when UDFj-39546284 was still in the skies - star formation accelerated tenfold. It was then when spiral galaxies and the other glorious formations that define the modern universe appeared.

Just what forces drove those changes are not certain. Hubble has a lot more stargazing to do before more answers are revealed - and a lot more already-gathered images of thousands of other galaxies to analyze. Better still will be the information that comes from the long-awaited James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble follow-on, which is slated for launch in 2015. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2010.)

"If we go a little bit further back in time, we're going to see even more dramatic changes," promises Illingworth, "closer to when the first galaxies were just starting to form." Not far beyond that lies the dawn of the cosmos themselves.

From Time Magazine 

The Hubble Space Telescope's Greatest Hits



Black Hole
On April 24, 1990, the telescope named after the great astronomer Edwin Hubble burst through earth's atmosphere and it has been taking photos of the edges of the known Universe ever since. Shortly after its launch, the Hubble snapped a photo of NGC 4261, an elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster. Although the telescope had a flawed mirror at the time, astronomers nevertheless were able to detect a super massive black hole at least half a billion times larger than the sun at the center of this galaxy.



Eagle Nebula
The Hubble orbits at around 370 miles above earth. Unlike previous telescopes, it can make digital photographs using light visible to the naked eye. And since it orbits above the earth's atmosphere, its photos are not obscured by smog, haze or light. For Jeff Hester, the astronomer responsible for this photo of the Eagle Nebula, taken just a few years after the telescope's first service mission, the image represents "the recovery of Hubble and the dreams that had originally accompanied its launch."



Saturn Aurora
A large amount of solar wind activity from the sun creates a bright aurora around the south pole of the planet Saturn, rising more than a thousand miles above its cloud tops.



Butterfly Nebula
Also known as the Bug Nebula, the butterfly-shaped nebula consists of heated gas made up of oxygen and nitrogen, the whole of which tears through space at speeds in excess of 60,000 miles an hour. The dying star in the center is not unlike our sun.



Deep Field View
In 1995, the telescope peered into a tiny spot in the sky for ten days, which surprisingly revealed the existence of at least 10,000 galaxies, some billions of light years away. This is the deepest visible light image ever made.



Pluto
Taken in 2002 and 2003, this is the most detailed and highest resolution image of the entire surface of the dwarf planet Pluto, a member of the population of bodies that reside in a part of our Solar System known as the Kuiper Belt. It is believed that the methane on Pluto's surface is broken up by the ultraviolet radiation from the sun, leaving behind a dark, carbon-rich residue.



V838 Monocerotis
In the beginning of 2002, a dull star floating some 20,000 light-years away from the sun, in the constellation Monceros, experienced a major outburst that threw illuminating dust or 'light echos' into space, temporarily making it the brightest star in the Milky Way galaxy. Since its explosion, this mysterious star's apparent brightness has changed to mere obscurity.



Horsehead Nebula
Located approximately 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, this dark nebula is one of the most photographed and identifiable nebulae; its cloud dust and gases form what appears to be a horsehead in the night sky.

Antennae Galaxies
Approximately 500 years ago, two galaxies collided together to form the Antennae galaxies in the constellation Corvus. They are the nearest and youngest example of galaxies fusing together to form what astronomers call interacting galaxies. In this process, billions of stars and star clusters are formed.



Crab Nebula
In 1054 AD, Chinese astronomers witnessed a stellar explosion in the constellation Taurus. One thousand years later, the tattered remnants of the super dense neutron star's explosion, also known as a supernova, are still visible, sweeping up gas as they expand at a rate of 1,500 kilometers per second and rotating about 30 times per second.



Centaurus A
By looking deep into space, the Hubble has been able to photograph the past. Incredibly, with the help of Hubble, astronomers have been able to see what the universe looked like 600 million years after the Big Bang. It is believed that the firestorm of starbirth along the dark dust rift of Centaurus A is a result of a violent collision. Over 100 star formations have been identified here, mostly young stars in blue. The older, more evolved stars reside in the bulge of the galaxy, which also contains a super massive black hole at its center that is swallowing up a spiral galaxy containing millions of stars.



Jupiter's Moon
In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observed Jupiter and four of its largest moons. The one called Io, (center) is the most geologically active in our Solar System, due to its many volcanoes. Although it appears to be skimming the planet's cloud tops, Io is actually 310,000 miles from the surface of Jupiter. The black dot to right center is the moon's shadow. It takes Io just 42.5 hours to revolve once around Jupiter.



Dark Matter and Dark Energy
The collection of photos taken by the Hubble includes some of the most detailed photographs ever taken of the things in our universe. In the 20 years since its launch, the Hubble has made close to 100 million images, confirming the existence of black holes, exoplanets, supernovae, nebulae, proplyds, and more recently, the existence of dark matter and energy.



        Data from Fox News and Time Magazine - Re-Edit by SNUMA WM - January 29, 2011