Astronomers discover ancestors of Milky Way-type galaxies
08 January 2008
When dealing with space-time relationships in a way that deals with "looking back into the past" you first need to define what they think they are seeing. If an object is 1 light year away it takes 1 year for its light to reach us, therefore the light we are seeing left there 1 year ago. Astronomers at Rutgers and Penn state universities believe they are looking at a galaxy that is only 2 billion years away from the start of the universe therefore it must be around 18 billion light years away.
The Hubble Space Telescope is capable of taking incredible pictures of distant objects; however, it is still just a picture. Even our nearest neighboring star being 5 light years away is so far away that the only thing we can see when looking at it in a telescope is a dot of light. Everything you hear about stars with planets and distant galaxies are usually determined by the color of the light it produces. The reason this discovery is important to them is because the galaxy is actually large enough to see some detail of it yet far away enough to be considered one of "the first galaxies ever to form".
What is not mentioned is that this is so important because in every other direction we look galaxies this far away are fully formed. Why don't we see these in every direction if all galaxies started this way? If we all started at a single 'big bang' shouldn't we all be heading away from each other in such a way that even if we were on one side and they were on the other the light should have already passed us? Light travel is a highly speculative subject dealing with quantum physics so there is nothing that can be said for sure on the way that light travels across the universe, but for the sake of argument lets say those galaxies are billions of light years away (even though they may not be). They are claiming that 10 or more galaxies have pulled together over the past billion or so years to form this young spiral... who was observing this a billion years ago to verify this claim? If you have been watching someone walk down your sidewalk at 2 mph, would you conclude that they started 4000 years ago in China?
The article says they are "fertile breeding grounds for new stars". If you can't see any of the details of even the closest star, how can you make a claim that says this is a fertile breeding ground of many stars? No star has ever been seen form, and especially not entire galaxies worth.
"Finding these objects and discovering that they are a step in the evolution of our galaxy is akin to finding a key fossil in the path of human evolution, said Gawiser." I couldn't agree with you more. Just like finding a dead bone in the dirt can not prove that it had any ancestor is just like how finding a odd shaped galaxy does not prove that ours started out that way.
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/health/ astronomers-discover-ancestors-of-milky-way-type-galaxies_10012048.html
