Has Hubble opened a window back in time to the earliest galaxies?

Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Telescope, a team of astronomers found galaxies that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang, making this one of the most significant discoveries of dwarf galaxies from that time.

|
Courtesy of HST Frontier Fields team/NASA,ESA
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1–2403. This is one of six being studied by the Hubble Frontier Fields programme, which together have produced the deepest images of gravitational lensing ever made.
|
Courtesy of HST Frontier Fields team/NASA,ESA
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1–2403. This is one of six being studied by the Hubble Frontier Fields programme, which together have produced the deepest images of gravitational lensing ever made.
|
Courtesy of HST Frontier Fields team/NASA,ESA
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1–2403. This is one of six being studied by the Hubble Frontier Fields programme, which together have produced the deepest images of gravitational lensing ever made.

It may have been “Back to the Future” Day on Wednesday, but today scientists announced they were able to look back into the past – literally.

Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Telescope, a team of astronomers found more than 250 galaxies that were in existence less than a billion years after the Big Bang, making this one of the most significant discoveries of dwarf galaxies from that time.

“The light from these galaxies took over 12 billion years to reach the telescope, allowing the astronomers to look back in time when the universe was still very young,” according to a statement from Hubble.

The team found that all the light coming from these galaxies may have played an important part in one of the universe’s most enigmatic eras called the epoch of reionization. That’s when the dense fog of hydrogen gas that used to blanket the early universe began to dissipate. As the fog cleared, the universe became translucent to ultraviolet light, which could then move over longer distances without being obstructed by the hydrogen gas.

“The faintest galaxies detected in these Hubble observations are fainter than any other yet uncovered in the deepest Hubble observations,” said Johan Richard from the Observatoire de Lyon, France, in the statement.

Through this observation, astronomers were able to discern whether these very galaxies were part of that process. The tiniest but most abundant galaxies in this study could be considered to have important roles in maintaining the universe’s transparency, therefore telling scientists “with some confidence” that the epoch of reionization happened about 700 million years after the Big Bang.

The Hubble Telescope has been opening doors to the distant universe for 25 years, as The Christian Science Monitor's Pete Spotts reported in April:

Although the orbital observatory has endured its share of problems, it has overcome the setbacks to emerge as one of the world’s most important astronomical instruments since the tiny telescope Galileo turned toward the heavens.

As astrophysicist Mario Livio puts it: Hubble “is arguably the most successful experiment in the history of science.”

For this latest discovery, the team, led by Hakim Atek of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, took advantage of gravitational lensing images captured with the most depth possible. This allows for the universe’s first generation of galaxies to be searched for and studied.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Has Hubble opened a window back in time to the earliest galaxies?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/1023/Has-Hubble-opened-a-window-back-in-time-to-the-earliest-galaxies
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe