PIA03654: A Cauldron of Stars at the Galaxy's Center
Target Name: Milky Way
Mission: Spitzer Space Telescope
Instrument: IRAC
Product Size: 7002 x 5050 pixels (width x height)
Produced By: California Institute of Technology
Full-Res TIFF: PIA03654.tif
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Full-Res JPEG: PIA03654.jpg
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Original Caption Released with Image:
This dazzling infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows hundreds of thousands of stars crowded into the swirling core of our spiral Milky Way galaxy. In visible-light pictures, this region cannot be seen at all because dust lying between Earth and the galactic center blocks our view.
In this false-color picture, old and cool stars are blue, while dust features lit up by blazing hot, massive stars are shown in a reddish hue. Both bright and dark filamentary clouds can be seen, many of which harbor stellar nurseries. The plane of the Milky Way's flat disk is apparent as the main, horizontal band of clouds. The brightest white spot in the middle is the very center of the galaxy, which also marks the site of a

supermassive black hole.
The region pictured here is immense, with a horizontal span of 890 light-years and a vertical span of 640 light-years. Earth is located 26,000 light-years away, out in one of the Milky Way's spiral arms. Though most of the objects seen in this image are located at the galactic center, the features above and below the galactic plane tend to lie closer to Earth.
Scientists are intrigued by the giant lobes of dust extending away from the plane of the galaxy. They believe the lobes may have been formed by winds from massive stars.
This image is a mosaic of thousands of short exposures taken by Spitzer's infrared array camera, showing emissions from wavelengths of 3.6 microns (blue), 4.5 microns (green), 5.8 microns (orange), and 8.0 microns (red). The entire region was imaged in less than 16 hours.
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image Addition Date:
2006-01-10 http://astroclock2010.wordpress.com/cosmic-timeline-01/ http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/cluster-m10.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiiiCr9wZW8

http://muuficom.tumblr.com/post/5962311456/peteuplink-nasa-swift-finds-most-distant
Posted by The Mullet Master On May - 26 - 2011
A cataclysmic explosion of a huge star near the edge of the universe is the most distant object spied by a telescope.
As reported by the BBC, scientists believe the blast, which was detected by NASA’s Swift space observatory, occurred a mere 520 million years after the Big Bang.
This means its light has taken a staggering 13.14 billion years to reach Earth.
Details of the discovery will appear shortly in the Astrophysical Journal.
The event, which was picked up by Swift in April 2009, is referred to by astronomers using the designation GRB 090429B.
The “GRB” stands for “gamma-ray burst” – a sudden pulse of very high-energy light that the telescope is tuned to find on the sky.

These bursts are usually associated with extremely violent processes, such as the end-of-life collapse of giant stars.
“It would have been a huge star, perhaps 30 times the mass of our Sun,” said lead researcher Dr Antonino Cucchiara from the University of
California, Berkeley.
“We do not have enough information to claim this was one of the so-called ‘Population III” stars, which are the very first generation of stars in the Universe. But certainly we are in the earliest phases of star formation,” he told BBC News.
Swift, as its name implies, has to act quickly to catch gamma-ray flashes because they will register for only a few minutes.

Fortunately, an afterglow at longer wavelengths will persist sometimes for days, which allows follow-up observations by other telescopes that can then determine distance.
It was this afterglow analysis that established another burst in the week previous to GRB 090429B to be at a separation from Earth of 13.04 billion light-years, making it temporarily the “most distant object in the Universe”.
This other event (GRB 090423) was reported fairly soon after its occurrence, but it has taken astronomers two years to come back with a confident assessment that an even greater expanse lies between Earth and GRB 090429B.
There are other competing candidates for the title of “most distant object”. Hubble, for example, was given much more powerful instruments during its final astronaut servicing mission in 2009, and teams working on new images from the famous space telescope have seen galaxies that look not far short of GRB 090429B – and potentially even further out.
It should be stated, of course, that in these sorts of observations, there is always a degree of uncertainty.
Hubble’s targets were galaxies – collections of stars; and GRB 090429B is the signature of a single event, a single star. So, in that sense, it might be considered apart.
Scientists are very keen to probe these great distances because they will learn how the early Universe evolved, and that will help them explain why the cosmos looks the way it does now.

They are particularly keen to trace the very first populations of stars. These hot, blue giants would have grown out of the cold neutral gas that pervaded the young cosmos.
These behemoths would have burnt brilliant but brief lives, producing the very first heavy elements.
Their intense ultra-violet light would also have “fried” the neutral gas around them – ripping electrons off atoms – to produce the diffuse intergalactic plasma we still detect between nearby stars today.
Popularity: 1% [ ?
]
GRB 090429B was a gamma-ray burst first detected on 29 April 2009, the second detected that day. Though this burst was detected in 2009, it was not until 2011 that its distance was announced, have a redshift of z=9.4, becoming the most distant GRB known in May 2011, usurping GRB
090423 .
[1]
On 2009 April 29, a five-second-long burst of gamma rays from the constellation Canes Venatici triggered the Burst Alert Telescope on NASA's
Swift satellite . As with most gamma-ray bursts , this one, designated GRB 090429B, heralded the death of a star some 30 times the Sun's mass and the likely birth of a new black hole .
Astrophysics: Most distant cosmic blast seen
Bing Zhang
Nature 461, 1221-1223(29 October 2009) doi:10.1038/4611221a

BACK TO ARTICLE
After the Big Bang, the Universe cools rapidly while expanding. About 400,000 years after this event, free electrons and protons combine to form neutral atoms, leaving a bath of background radiation that currently shines in the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Thereafter, the Universe remains neutral, until the first stars and galaxies light up at a later epoch. Photons emitted by these objects knock electrons out of atoms and 're-ionize' the Universe. Studies of the most distant galaxies and quasars suggest that the re-ionization process was completed around 800 million to 900 million years after the Big Bang, but no information is available about the cosmic 'dark ages'. Observations of -ray bursts such as GRB 090423 (refs 1 , 2 ), which occurred about 630 million years after the Big Bang, offer a glimpse of the cosmic dark ages. (Adapted from ref. 15 .)
New Gamma-Ray Burst Smashes Cosmic Distance Record
04.28.09
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The fading infrared afterglow of GRB 090423 appears in the center of this false-color image taken with the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii.
The burst is the farthest cosmic explosion yet seen. Credit: Gemini Observatory/NSF/AURA/D. Fox, A. Cucchiara (Penn State Univ.) and E.
Berger (Harvard Univ.)

> View larger image
This image merges data from Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical (blue, green) and X-Ray (orange, red) telescopes. No visible light accompanied the burst, which hints at great distance. The image is 6.3 arcminutes wide. Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler
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Gamma-ray bursts longer than two seconds are caused by the detonation of a massive star at the end of its life. Jets of particles and gamma radiation are emitted in opposite directions from the stellar core as the star collapses. This animation shows what a gamma-ray burst might look like up close. Credit: NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde NASA's Swift satellite and an international team of astronomers have found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the universe was only 630 million years old, or less than five percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB
090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen.
"Swift was designed to catch these very distant bursts," said Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md. "The incredible distance to this burst exceeded our greatest expectations -- it was a true blast from the past."

At 3:55 a.m. EDT on April 23, Swift detected a ten-second-long gamma-ray burst of modest brightness. It quickly pivoted to bring its ultraviolet/optical and X-ray telescopes to observe the burst location. Swift saw a fading X-ray afterglow but none in visible light.
"The burst most likely arose from the explosion of a massive star," said Derek Fox at Pennsylvania State University. "We're seeing the demise of a star -- and probably the birth of a black hole -- in one of the universe's earliest stellar generations."
Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets -- driven by processes not fully understood -- punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short-lived afterglows in many wavelengths.
"The lack of visible light alone suggested this could be a very distant object," explained team member Edo Berger of Harvard University.
Beyond a certain distance, the expansion of the universe shifts all optical emission into longer infrared wavelengths. While a star's ultraviolet light could be similarly shifted into the visible region, ultraviolet-absorbing hydrogen gas grows thicker at earlier times. "If you look far enough away, you can't see visible light from any object," he noted.
Within three hours of the burst, Nial Tanvir at the University of Leicester, U.K., and his colleagues reported detection of an infrared source at the
Swift position using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. "Burst afterglows provide us with the most information about the exploded star and its environs," Tanvir said. "But because afterglows fade out so fast, we must target them quickly."
At the same time, Fox led an effort to obtain infrared images of the afterglow using the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea. The source appeared in longer-wavelength images but was absent in an image taken at the shortest wavelength of 1 micron. This "drop out" corresponded to a distance of about 13 billion light-years.
As Fox spread the word about the record distance, telescopes around the world slewed toward GRB 090423 to observe the afterglow before it faded away.
At the Galileo National Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, a team including Guido Chincarini at the University of Milan-Bicocca,
Italy, determined that the afterglow's so-called redshift was at least 7.6. Tanvir's team, gathering nearly simultaneous observations using one of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescopes on Cerro Paranal, Chile, found a redshift of 8.2, later confirmed by the Italian group. This means the burst exploded 13.035 billion light-years away.

"It's an incredible find," Chincarini said. "What makes it even better is that a telescope named for Galileo made this measurement during the year in which we celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first astronomical use of the telescope."
The previous record holder was a burst seen in September 2008. It showed a redshift of 6.7, which places it 190 million light-years closer than
GRB 090423.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages Swift. It was built and is being operated in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, the
Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and General Dynamics of Gilbert, Ariz., in the United States. International collaborators include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Sciences Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory and the Italian Space
Agency in Italy, and additional partners in Germany and Japan.
The age of the universe is about 13.75 billion years, but due to the expansion of space humans are observing objects that were originally much closer but are now considerably farther away (as defined in terms of cosmological proper distance , which is equal to the comoving distance at the present time) than a static 13.75 billion light-years distance.
[2]
The diameter of the observable universe is estimated to be about 28 billion parsecs
(93 billion light-years ),
[3]
putting the edge of the observable universe at about 46–47 billion light-years away.
[4][5]
 Source: Gemini Observatory
 Posted Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The Gemini Observatory has released the first color image of what astronomers are calling the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object is what is known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB) which are the most energetic single events known in the universe.
�
Our infrared observations from Gemini immediately suggested that this was an unusually distant burst, these images were the smoking gun.
� said Edo Berger, a leader in the scientific team that made the discovery and professor at Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
�
The visible light was completely absorbed by hydrogen gas in the early universe, but the GRB was brightly glowing in the infrared images from Gemini.
�
The burst as measured by Gemini and subsequent observations is at a redshift of z = 8.2, such a great distance that its light has been traveling for over 13 of the estimated 13.7 billion year age of the universe.
�
This makes it easily the most distant object ever seen by humanity, and takes us to a new frontier beyond redshift eight.
�
said Berger.

The Gemini observations were made possible due to the extreme infrared sensitivity of the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawai
� i and a unique process of rapidly observing
� targets of opportunity
�
immediately, before events like GRBs fade quickly from view.
Going by the designation GRB 090423, the GRB was detected by NASA
� s Swift satellite on April 23rd, 2009 at 3:55 a.m. EDT and was observed on the ground within minutes of its discovery. Gemini first attempted an observation in optical (visible) light and when the detection was negative, used the Gemini

Near-infrared Imager/Spectrograph (NIRI) to make the observation in several infrared wavelengths. These images gave a relatively precise estimate for the object
� s distance and were combined to make the color image released today.
�
I have been chasing gamma-ray bursts for a decade, trying to find such a spectacular event,
�
said Berger.
�
We now have the first direct proof that the young universe was teeming with exploding stars and newly-born black holes only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang,
�
he added.
Gamma-ray bursts are the universe
� s most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets
�
driven by processes not fully understood
�
punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short- lived afterglows in other wavelengths.
The redshift is assumed to be due to the Doppler Effect.
That means we only get information about the speed of an object, not the distance.
It appears the further away an object is, in space, the more it is red shifted. Based on that assumption, it is believed the further an object is, the greater the red shift. So, Edwin Hubble made up a table based on what people knew and guessed about distances. The Hubble constant comes from this table.
The Hubble constant (H) is used to convert an observed red shift into a distance using the formula d ≈ (c / H) × the red shift, where c is the velocity of light in a vacuum, and H can be anything between 50 and 100 km/s/Mpc depending on who you ask
Splitting the difference for this case:
Distance roughly equal to c / H * red shift where c = speed of light in a vacuum (3E8)

and H ≈ Hubble constant ≈ 75 km/s/Mpc d ≈ red shift * 300000000 / 75 = red shift * 4 million for red shift of 0.02 , d ≈ 80,000 Mpc
1 parsec (parallax of one arc second) or pc = 30.857 trillion meters, 3.26156 light-years, or 1.9174×1013 miles.
---------------------------
The first thing to consider here is what the "z" represents - it represents the scale factor of the universe (at the time that the light we see was originally emitted), compared to the size of the universe today, and that comparison is expressed in the form 1+z.
When we look at a galaxy with a redshift of z=1, we are seeing the universe as it was when it was 2 times smaller, or half the size, that it is today.
And when we look at a galaxy with a redshift of z=7 we are seeing the universe as it was when it was 8 times smaller than it is today!
As we look out into the universe, we see increasing redshifts, and see the universe as it was at different stages in its development. Early on the observable universe (the parts of the universe we have received light from) was really small and was expanding really fast, so it is, as you surmised, something to do with scaling
Let’s begin our cosmic timeline with a measurement of the smallest indivisible unit of meaningful time. This is the time it takes light, travelling at 186,000 miles per second, to travel across the smallest measurement of length which has any meaning.
This turns out to be 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001
of a centimetre , and is called a
‘Planck length’
, named by quantum physicist
Max Planck in the first years of the twentieth century. This tiny unit of time is called, yes, you have guessed it, ‘Planck time’ . This turns out to

be 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
of a second , or 10 to the power of minus 43 . This is a tenth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second . What would we do without all these zeros?
But when and how does time begin?
The modern theory of how our Universe began is very mysterious.
About 15 billion years ago the Universe suddenly existed where earlier there had been absolutely nothing.
This “nothing” really was nothing!
This “nothing” was not an empty space it was the absolute absence of space and time.
So how did the Universe suddenly appear?
The redshift is symbolized by z. The definition of z is
1 + z =
 observed
/
 rest
.
For example, taking the Balmer gamma line of galaxy 587731512071880746,
1 + z = 4780 / 4340.5 = 1.1, so z = 0.1.
If the observed wavelength were less than the rest wavelength, z would be negative - that would tell us that we have a blueshift, and the galaxy is approaching us. But it turns out that only almost every galaxy in the sky has a redshift in its spectrum.
Choosing the alpha, beta, or delta lines would also give approximately z = 0.1 - the measured redshift does not depend on which line you choose.
If you get very different redshifts when you use different lines, then you probably have not correctly identified at least one of the lines.

Sometimes we instead want to express a galaxy's redshift as the speed with which the galaxy moves away from us, in units of km/sec.
To convert from redshift z to velocity v measured in kilometers per second, the formula is v = c z, where c is the speed of light, c = 300,000 km/sec.
Thus, in this example, galaxy 587731512071880746 appears to be moving away from us at about 30,000 km/sec. This value is typical of the galaxy redshifts found in the SkyServer database.
Since the formula can be rewritten as z = v / c, it shows you how to interpret z: z measures the galaxy's speed away from us relative to the speed of light.
Up to this point things are straightforward, but this definition of z is tricky for two reasons. First, the formula v = c z is accurate only when z is small compared to 1.0 (0.1 would be OK in this sense). For high velocities, those that approach the cosmic speed limit - the speed of light - Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity says that a more complicated formula is needed. Second, while we often speak of the "motion of the galaxies," which implies motion through space, in fact the picture is that space itself is expanding. The galaxies are not moving through space, but just being carried along by space as it expands (see the Conclusion for more about this concept). In this picture, the redshift of a galaxy is not supposed to be interpreted as a velocity at all, even though the observed redshift looks just like a Doppler effect redshift.
Rather, the redshift tells us the size of the universe at the time the light left the galaxy. Because the universe is billions of light-years across, it takes billions of years for light from distant galaxies to reach us. Suppose the distance to galaxy 587731512071880746 was d(z) at the time the light left it that we are now observing (for z = 0.1, this time was roughly a billion years ago). In those billion years, the space in the universe has expanded, so that now the distance between our galaxy and it is d(0). Then
1 + z = d(0) / d(z).

We interpret this formula to mean this: at the time corresponding to redshift z = 0.1, all galaxies in the universe were 10% closer together. A measured value of z = 0.2 corresponds to a time when galaxies were 20% closer together than they are now, and so on.
The most distant objects exhibit larger redshifts corresponding to the Hubble flow of the universe. The largest observed redshift, corresponding to the greatest distance and furthest back in time, is that of the cosmic microwave background radiation ; the numerical value of its redshift is about z = 1089 (z = 0 corresponds to present time), and it shows the state of the Universe about 13.7 billion years ago, and 379,000 years after the initial moments of the Big
Bang .
The luminous point-like cores of quasars were the first "high-redshift" ( z > 0.1) objects discovered before the improvement of telescopes allowed for the discovery of other high-redshift galaxies.
For galaxies more distant than the Local Group and the nearby Virgo Cluster , but within a thousand megaparsecs or so, the redshift is approximately proportional to the galaxy's distance.
See also: List of most distant objects by type
Currently, the objects with the highest known redshifts are galaxies and the objects producing gamma ray bursts. The most reliable redshifts are from spectroscopic data, and the highest confirmed spectroscopic redshift of a galaxy is that of UDFy-38135539 [61] at a redshift of ,

corresponding to just 600 million years after the Big Bang. The previous record was held by IOK-1 ,
[62]
at a redshift , corresponding to just 750 million years after the Big Bang. Slightly less reliable are Lyman-break redshifts, the highest of which is the lensed galaxy A1689-zD1 at a redshift
[63]
and the next highest being .
[64]
The most distant observed gamma ray burst was GRB 090423 , which had a redshift of .
[65] The most distant known quasar, ULAS J1120+0641 , is at .
[66][67] The highest known redshift radio galaxy (TN
J0924-2201) is at a redshift from the quasar SDSS J1148+5251 at
[68]
and the highest known redshift molecular material is the detection of emission from the CO molecule
[69]
Extremely red objects (EROs) are astronomical sources of radiation that radiate energy in the red and near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. These may be starburst galaxies that have a high redshift accompanied by reddening from intervening dust, or they could be highly redshifted elliptical galaxies with an older (and therefore redder) stellar population.
[70]
Objects that are even redder than EROs are termed hyper extremely red objects (HEROs).
[71]
The cosmic microwave background has a redshift of , corresponding to an age of approximately 379,000 years after the Big Bang and a current comoving distance of more than 46 billion light years.
[72]
The yet-to-be-observed first light from the oldest Population III stars , not long after atoms first formed and the CMB ceased to be absorbed almost completely, may have redshifts in the range of .
[73]
Other high-redshift events predicted by physics but not presently observable are the cosmic neutrino background from about two seconds after the Big Bang (and a redshift in excess of )
[74]
and the cosmic gravitational wave background emitted directly from inflation at a redshift in excess of .
[75]

Click to Enlarge
Four of the first ALMA antennas at the Array Operations Site (AOS), located at 5000 metres altitude on the Chajnantor plateau, in the II Region of Chile. Three of them — those which are pointing in the same direction — are being tested together as part of the ongoing Commissioning and
Science Verification process. Across the image in the background is the impressive plane of the Milky Way, our own galaxy, here seen looking toward the centre. The centre of our galaxy is visible as a yellowish bulge crossed by dark lanes. The dark lanes are huge clouds of interstellar dust that lie in the disc of the galaxy. While opaque in visible light, they are transparent at longer wavelengths, such as the millimetre and submillimetre radiation detected by ALMA. ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, is the largest astronomical project in existence and is a truly global partnership between the scientific communities of East Asia, Europe and North America with Chile. ESO is the
European partner in ALMA.
Credit:
ESO/José Francisco Salgado ( josefrancisco.org
)

Click to Enlarge
This new Hubble image reveals the gigantic Pinwheel galaxy, one of the best known examples of "grand design spirals", and its supergiant starforming regions in unprecedented detail. The image is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy ever taken with Hubble.
Credit:
Image: European Space Agency & NASA
Acknowledgements:

Project Investigators for the original Hubble data: K.D. Kuntz (GSFC), F. Bresolin (University of Hawaii), J. Trauger (JPL), J. Mould (NOAO), and Y.-H. Chu (University of Illinois, Urbana)
Image processing: Davide De Martin ( ESA / Hubble )
CFHT image: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope/J.-C. Cuillandre/Coelum
NOAO image: George Jacoby, Bruce Bohannan, Mark Hanna/NOAO/AURA/NSF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC_1101
NASA's Hubble Finds Most Distant Galaxy Candidate Ever Seen in Universe
01.26.11
› Related Briefing Materials
Astronomers have pushed NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object's light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the previous record holder. The age of the universe is

approximately 13.7 billion years.
The tiny, dim object is a compact galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the big bang. More than 100 such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way. The new research offers surprising evidence that the rate of star birth in the early universe grew dramatically, increasing by about a factor of 10 from 480 million years to 650 million years after the big bang.

The farthest and one of the very earliest galaxies ever seen in the universe appears as a faint red blob in this ultra-deep–field exposure taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. This is the deepest infrared image taken of the universe. Based on the object's color, astronomers believe it is 13.2 billion light-years away. (Credit: NASA, ESA, G.
Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz, and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team)
› Larger image

"NASA continues to reach for new heights, and this latest Hubble discovery will deepen our understanding of the universe and benefit generations to come,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who was the pilot of the space shuttle mission that carried Hubble to orbit. “We could only dream when we launched Hubble more than 20 years ago that it would have the ability to make these types of groundbreaking discoveries and rewrite textbooks.”
Astronomers don't know exactly when the first stars appeared in the universe, but every step farther from Earth takes them deeper into the early formative years when stars and galaxies began to emerge in the aftermath of the big bang.
"These observations provide us with our best insights yet into the earlier primeval objects that have yet to be found," said Rychard Bouwens of the
University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Bouwens and Illingworth report the discovery in the Jan. 27 issue of the British science journal Nature.
This observation was made with the Wide Field Camera 3 starting just a few months after it was installed in the observatory in May 2009, during the last
NASA space shuttle servicing mission to Hubble. After more than a year of detailed observations and analysis, the object was positively identified in the camera's Hubble Ultra Deep Field-Infrared data taken in the late summers of 2009 and 2010.
The object appears as a faint dot of starlight in the Hubble exposures. It is too young and too small to have the familiar spiral shape that is characteristic of galaxies in the local universe. Although its individual stars can't be resolved by Hubble, the evidence suggests this is a compact galaxy of hot stars formed more than 100-to-200 million years earlier from gas trapped in a pocket of dark matter.

This video is a zoom into the Hubble Space Telescope infrared Ultra Deep Field, first taken in 2009. It is a very small patch of sky in the southern constellation Fornax. The zoom centers on the farthest identified object in the field. The object, possibly a galaxy, looks red because its light has been stretched by the expansion of the universe. Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon, STScI
"We're peering into an era where big changes are afoot," said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz. "The rapid rate at which the star birth is changing tells us if we go a little further back in time we're going to see even more dramatic changes, closer to when the first galaxies were just starting to form."
The proto-galaxy is only visible at the farthest infrared wavelengths observable by Hubble. Observations of earlier times, when the first stars and galaxies

were forming, will require Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
The hypothesized hierarchical growth of galaxies -- from stellar clumps to majestic spirals and ellipticals -- didn't become evident until the Hubble deep field exposures. The first 500 million years of the universe's existence, from a z of 1000 to 10, is the missing chapter in the hierarchical growth of galaxies. It's not clear how the universe assembled structure out of a darkening, cooling fireball of the big bang. As with a developing embryo, astronomers know there must have been an early period of rapid changes that would set the initial conditions to make the universe of galaxies what it is today.
"After 20 years of opening our eyes to the universe around us, Hubble continues to awe and surprise astronomers," said Jon Morse, NASA's Astrophysics
Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "It now offers a tantalizing look at the very edge of the known universe -- a frontier NASA strives to explore."
Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of
Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.
29 June 2011

imageimage
Click to Enlarge
A team of European astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope and a host of other telescopes to discover and study the most distant quasar found to date. This brilliant beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe. The results will appear in the 30 June 2011 issue of the journal Nature.
“This quasar is a vital probe of the early Universe. It is a very rare object that will help us to understand how supermassiv e black holes grew a few hundred million years after the Big Bang,” says Stephen Warren, the study’s team leader.
Quasars are very bright, distant galaxies that are believed to be powered by supermassive black holes at their centres. Their brilliance makes them powerful beacons that may help to probe the era when the first stars and galaxies were forming. The newly discovered quasar is so far away that its light probes the last part of the reionisation era [1] .
The quasar that has just been found, named ULAS J1120+0641 [2] , is seen as it was only 770 million years after the Big Bang (redshift 7.1, [3] ).
It took 12.9 billion years for its light to reach us.

Although more distant objects have been confirmed (such as a gamma-ray burst at redshift 8.2, eso0917 , and a galaxy at redshift 8.6, eso1041 ), the newly discovered quasar is hundreds of times brighter than these. Amongst objects bright enough to be studied in detail, this is the most distant by a large margin.
The next most-distant quasar is seen as it was 870 million years after the Big Bang (redshift 6.4). Similar objects further away cannot be found in visible-light surveys because their light, stretched by the expansion of the Universe, falls mostly in the infrared part of the spectrum by the time it gets to Earth. The European UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) which uses the UK's dedicated infrared telescope [4] in Hawaii was designed to solve this problem. The team of astronomers hunted through millions of objects in the UKIDSS database to find those that could be the long-sought distant quasars, and eventually struck gold.
“It took us five years to find this object,” explains Bram Venemans, one of the authors of the study.
“We were looking for a quasar with redshift higher than 6.5. Finding one that is this far away, at a redshift higher than 7, was an exciting surprise. By peering deep into the reionisation era, this quasar provides a unique opportunity to explore a 100 -million-year window in the history of the cosmos that was previously out of reach.”
The distance to the quasar was determined from observations made with the FORS2 instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and instruments on the Gemini North Telescope [5] . Because the object is comparatively bright it is possible to take a spectrum of it (which involves splitting the light from the object into its component colours). This technique allowed the astronomers to find out quite a lot about the quasar.
These observations showed that the mass of the black hole at the centre of ULAS J1120+0641 is about two billion times that of the Sun. This very high mass is hard to explain so early on after the Big Bang. Current theories for the growth of supermassive black holes predict a slow build-up in mass as the compact object pulls in matter from its surroundings.
“We think there are only about 100 bright quasars with redshift higher than 7 over the whole sky,” concludes Daniel Mortlock, the leading author of the paper.
“Finding this object required a painstaking search, but it was worth the effort to be able to unravel some of the mysteries of the early Universe.”
Notes
[1] About 300 000 years after the Big Bang, which occurred 13.7 billion years ago, the Universe had cooled down enough to allow electrons and protons to combine into neutral hydrogen (a gas without electric charge). This cool dark gas permeated the Universe until the first stars started forming about 100 to 150 million years later. Their intense ultraviolet radiation slowly split the hydrogen atoms back into protons and electrons,

a process called reionisation, making the Universe more transparent to ultraviolet light. It is believe that this era occurred between about 150 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang.
[2] The object was found using data from the UKIDSS Large Area Survey, or ULAS. The numbers and prefix ‘J’ refer to the quasar’s position in the sky.
[3] Because light travels at a finite speed, astronomers look back in time as they look further away into the Universe. It took 12.9 billion years for the light from ULAS J1120+0641 to travel to telescopes on Earth so the quasar is seen as it was when the Universe was only 770 million years old. In those 12.9 billion years, the Universe expanded and the light from the object stretched as a result. The cosmological redshift, or simply redshift, is a measure of the total stretching the Universe underwent between the moment when the light was emitted and the time when it was received.
[4] UKIRT is the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope. It is owned by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council and operated by the staff of the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hilo, Hawaii.
[5] FORS2 is the VLT’s FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph. Other instruments used to split up the light of the object were the
Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) and the Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS). The Liverpool Telescope, the Isaac Newton
Telescope and the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) were also used to confirm survey measurements.
More information
This research was presented in a paper to appear in the journal Nature on 30 June 2011.
The team is composed of Daniel J. Mortlock (Imperial College London [Imperial], UK), Stephen J. Warren (Imperial), Bram P. Venemans (ESO,
Garching, Germany), Mitesh Patel (Imperial), Paul C. Hewett (Institute of Astronomy [IoA], Cambridge, UK), Richard G. McMahon (IoA),
Chris Simpson (Liverpool John Moores University, UK), Tom Theuns (Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham, UK and University of
Antwerp, Belgium), Eduardo A. Gonzáles-Solares (IoA), Andy Adamson (Joint Astronomy Centre, Hilo, USA), Simon Dye (Centre for
Astronomy and Particle Theory, Nottingham, UK), Nigel C. Hambly (Institute for Astronomy, Edinburgh, UK), Paul Hirst (Gemini Observatory,
Hilo, USA), Mike J. Irwin (IoA), Ernst Kuiper (Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands), Andy Lawrence (Institute for Astronomy, Edinburgh,
UK), Huub J. A. Röttgering (Leiden Observatory, The Netherlands).

ESO, the European Southern Observatory, is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive astronomical observatory. It is supported by 15 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany,
Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries.
ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the
VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is the European partner of a revolutionary astronomical telescope ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. ESO is currently planning a 40-metre-class European
Extremely Large optical/near-infrared Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.
Links
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Research paper: Nature paper
Photos of the VLT
Contacts
Daniel Mortlock
Astrophysics Group, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London
London, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7594 7878
Email: d.mortlock@imperial.ac.uk
Bram Venemans
ESO Astronomer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6631
Email: bveneman@eso.org
Richard Hook
ESO, La Silla, Paranal, E-ELT and Survey Telescopes Public Information Officer

Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Email: rhook@eso.org
A zoom diving deep into the nucleus of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) then dissolving into an animation of a concentration of red stars. Pushing deeper into the animation reveals a disk of young blue stars swirling around a black hole. Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph
(STIS) revealed this disk of young blue stars that were swirling around a black hole in M31 in much the same way that the planets in our solar system revolve around the Sun. Astronomers are perplexed about how the pancake-shaped disk of stars could form so close to a giant black hole.
In such a hostile environment, the black hole's tidal forces should tear matter apart, making it difficult for gas and dust to collapse and form stars.
The observations, astronomers say, may provide clues to the activities in the cores of more distant galaxies.
Hubble Views the Globular Cluster M10
06.22.12

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Like many of the most famous objects in the sky, globular cluster Messier 10 was of little interest to its discoverer. Charles Messier, the 18th century French astronomer, cataloged over 100 galaxies and clusters, but was primarily interested in comets. Through the telescopes available at the time, comets, nebulae, globular clusters and galaxies appeared just as faint, diffuse blobs and could easily be confused for one another.
Only by carefully observing their motion — or lack of it — were astronomers able to distinguish them: comets move slowly relative to the stars in the background, while other more distant astronomical objects do not move at all.
Messier’s decision to catalog all the objects that he could find, and that were not comets, was a pragmatic solution which would have a huge impact on astronomy. His catalog of just over 100 objects includes many of the most famous objects in the night sky. Messier 10, seen here in an image from the
NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is one of them. Messier described it in the very first edition of his catalog, which was published in 1774 and included the first 45 objects he identified.
Messier 10 is a ball of stars that lies about 15,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer). Approximately 80 lightyears across, it should therefore appear about two thirds the size of the moon in the night sky. However, its outer regions are extremely diffuse, and even the comparatively bright core is too dim to see with the naked eye.
Hubble, which has no problems seeing faint objects, has observed the brightest part of the center of the cluster in this image, a region which is about 13 light-years across.
This image is made up of observations made in visible and infrared light using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The observations were carried out as part of a major Hubble survey of globular clusters in the Milky Way.
A version of this image was entered into the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Image Processing Competition by contestant flashenthunder. Hidden Treasures is an initiative to invite astronomy enthusiasts to search the Hubble archive for stunning images that have never been seen by the general public. The competition has now closed and the results will be published soon.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
Image credit: ESA/NASA

Willman 1
Have you ever wondered what the smallest galaxy in the universe is? As far as we know today, that distinction goes to a galaxy called Willman
1.
Willman 1 was discovered in 2004 by Beth Willman of New York University’s Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics. This tiny galaxy lies about 120,000 light years away from our own Milky Way Galaxy and is thought to have a mass of only about 500,000 solar masses.
This small galaxy was discovered as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It was found in the constellation Ursa Major and is extremely faint.
In fact, it has been called ultra faint and you would never be able to see it with the naked eye! Special image processing had to be used in order to visualize it. It holds the distinction as being the third dimmest galaxy known.
This object has been categorized as an extreme globular cluster or ultra low-mass dwarf galaxy. It is thought to be part of the halo of stars that surround our Milky Way and the colors of the stars are similiar to those stars that are in the Sagittarius tidal stream – which is a group of stars that were most likely part of a dwarf companion galaxy that has since merged with the Milky Way.
The technology used to discover this type of galaxy is still relatively new and I would guess that we will continue to learn more about how galaxies form.
SOURCE: Beth Willman, New York University, The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

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Quasars reside in a variety of galaxies, from normal to highly disturbed. When seen through ground-based telescopes, these compact, enigmatic light sources resemble stars, yet they are billions of light-years away and several hundred billion times brighter than normal stars. The following
Hubble Space Telescope images show examples of different home sites of all quasars. But all the sites must provide the fuel to power these unique light beacons. Astronomers believe that a quasar turns on when a massive black hole at the nucleus of a galaxy feeds on gas and stars. As the matter falls into the black hole, intense radiation is emitted. Eventually, the black hole will stop emitting radiation once it consumes all nearby matter. Then it needs debris from a collision of galaxies or another process to provide more fuel. The column of images on the left represents normal galaxies; the center, colliding galaxies; and the right, peculiar galaxies.
Top left: This image shows quasar PG 0052+251, which is 1.4 billion light-years from Earth, at the core of a normal spiral galaxy. Astronomers are surprised to find host galaxies, such as this one, that appear undisturbed by the strong quasar radiation.
Bottom left: Quasar PHL 909 is 1.5 billion light-years from Earth and lies at the core of an apparently normal elliptical galaxy.
Top center: The photo reveals evidence of a catastrophic collision between two galaxies traveling at about 1 million mph. The debris from this collision may be fueling quasar IRAS04505-2958, which is 3 billion light-years from Earth. Astronomers believe that a galaxy plunged vertically through the plane of a spiral galaxy, ripping out its core and leaving the spiral ring (at the bottom of the picture). The core lies in front of the quasar, the bright object in the center of the image. Surrounding the core are star-forming regions. The distance between the quasar and spiral ring is 15,000 light-years, which is one-seventh the diameter of our Milky Way. A foreground star lies just above the quasar.

Bottom center: Hubble has captured quasar PG 1012+008, located 1.6 billion light-years from Earth, merging with a bright galaxy (the object just below the quasar). The two objects are 31,000 light-years apart. The swirling wisps of dust and gas surrounding the quasar and galaxy provide strong evidence for an interaction between them. The compact galaxy on the left of the quasar also may be beginning to merge with the quasar.
Top right: Hubble has captured a tidal tail of dust and gas beneath quasar 0316-346, located 2.2 billion light-years from Earth. The peculiarshaped tail suggests that the host galaxy has interacted with a passing galaxy that is not in the image.
Bottom right: Hubble has captured evidence of a dance between two merging galaxies. The galaxies may have orbited each other several times before merging, leaving distinct loops of glowing gas around quasar IRAS13218+0552. The quasar is 2 billion light-years from Earth. The elongated core in the center of the image may comprise the two nuclei of the merging galaxies.
Object Names: PG 0052+251, PHL 909, IRAS04505-2958, PG 1012+008, 0316-346, IRAS13218+0552
Image Type: Astronomical
Credit: John Bahcall ( Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton ), Mike Disney ( University of Wales ), and NASA

A Hubble Heritage Release / An American Astronomical Society Meeting Release
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January 10, 2011: A ghostly, glowing, green blob of gas has become one of astronomy's great cosmic mystery stories. The space oddity was spied in 2007 by Dutch high-school teacher Hanny van Arkel while participating in the online Galaxy Zoo project. The cosmic blob, called
Hanny's Voorwerp (Hanny's Object in Dutch), appears to be a solitary green island floating near a normal-looking spiral galaxy, called IC 2497.
Since the discovery, puzzled astronomers have used a slew of telescopes, including X-ray and radio observatories, to help unwrap the mystery.
Astronomers found that Hanny's Voorwerp is the only visible part of a 300-light-year-long gaseous streamer stretching around the galaxy. The greenish Voorwerp is visible because a searchlight beam of light from the galaxy's core illuminated it. This beam came from a quasar, a bright, energetic object that is powered by a black hole. An encounter with another galaxy may have fed the black hole and pulled the gaseous streamer from IC 2497.
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Resembling looming rain clouds on a stormy day, dark lanes of dust crisscross the giant elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.
Hubble's panchromatic vision, stretching from ultraviolet through near-infrared wavelengths, reveals the vibrant glow of young, blue star clusters and a glimpse into regions normally obscured by the dust.
The warped shape of Centaurus A's disk of gas and dust is evidence for a past collision and merger with another galaxy. The resulting shockwaves cause hydrogen gas clouds to compress, triggering a firestorm of new star formation. These are visible in the red patches in this
Hubble close-up.
At a distance of just over 11 million light-years, Centaurus A contains the closest active galactic nucleus to Earth. The center is home for a supermassive black hole that ejects jets of high-speed gas into space, but neither the supermassive black hole or the jets are visible in this image.
This image was taken in July 2010 with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3.
Object Names: Centaurus A, Cen A, NGC 5128

Image Type: Astronomical
Credit: NASA , ESA , and the Hubble Heritage ( STScI / AURA )ESA /Hubble Collaboration
Acknowledgment: R. O'Connell (University of Virginia) and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee