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Oldest Galaxy Ever Seen: A Peek into 13 Billion Years Ago

Tuesday, May 24, 2016 0:49

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The magicians of science have looked further back into time than any others have done to this point in time to plumb the great mysteries of our creation.

In 2012, WMAP estimated the age of the universe to be 13.772 billion years, with an uncertainty of 59 million years. In 2013, Planck measured the age of the universe at 13.82 billion years.

An international team of scientists, including two professors and three graduate students from UCLA, has detected and confirmed the faintest early-universe galaxy ever. Using the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the researchers detected the galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago. The results were published in theAstrophysical Journal Letters.

Tommaso Treu, a professor of physics and astronomy in the UCLA College and a co-author of the research, said the discovery could be a step toward unraveling one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy: how a period known as the “cosmic dark ages” ended.

Galaxy cluster: Composite image of the galaxy cluster from three different filters on the Hubble Space Telescope. The wave charts (insets at left) show spectra of the multiply imaged systems. The fact that they share peaks at the same wavelength shows that they belong to the same source. At bottom right, the Keck I and Keck II Telescopes at Hawaii’s the W. M. Keck Observatory.

Credit: BRADAC/HST/W. M. Keck Observatory

The researchers made the discovery using an effect called gravitational lensing to see the incredibly faint object, which was born just after the Big Bang. Gravitational lensing was first predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago; the effect is similar to that of an image behind a glass lens appearing distorted because of how the lens bends light.

The detected galaxy was behind a galaxy cluster known as MACS2129.4-0741, which is massive enough to create three different images of the galaxy.

According to the Big Bang theory, the universe cooled as it expanded. As that happened, Treu said, protons captured electrons to form hydrogen atoms, which in turn made the universe opaque to radiation — giving rise to the cosmic dark ages.

A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years. The far left depicts the earliest moment we can now probe, when a period of “inflation” produced a burst of exponential growth in the universe. (Size is depicted by the vertical extent of the grid in this graphic.) For the next several billion years, the expansion of the universe gradually slowed down as the matter in the universe pulled on itself via gravity.

More recently, the expansion has begun to speed up again as the repulsive effects of dark energy have come to dominate the expansion of the universe. The afterglow light seen by WMAP was emitted about 375,000 years after inflation and has traversed the universe largely unimpeded since then. The conditions of earlier times are imprinted on this light; it also forms a backlight for later developments of the universe.

“At some point, a few hundred million years later, the first stars formed and they started to produce ultraviolet light capable of ionizing hydrogen,” Treu said. “Eventually, when there were enough stars, they might have been able to ionize all of the intergalactic hydrogen and create the universe as we see it now.”

That process, called cosmic reionization, happened about 13 billion years ago, but scientists have so far been unable to determine whether there were enough stars to do it or whether more exotic sources, like gas falling onto supermassive black holes, might have been responsible.

The detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe created from nine years of WMAP data. The image reveals 13.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) that correspond to the seeds that grew to become the galaxies. The signal from the our Galaxy was subtracted using the multi-frequency data. This image shows a temperature range of ± 200 microKelvin.

Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team

“Currently, the most likely suspect is stars within faint galaxies that are too faint to see with our telescopes without gravitational lensing magnification,” Treu said. “This study exploits gravitational lensing to demonstrate that such galaxies exist, and is thus an important step toward solving this mystery.”

The research team was led by Marusa Bradac, a professor at UC Davis. Co-authors include Matthew Malkan, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, and UCLA graduate students Charlotte Mason, Takahiro Morishita and Xin Wang.

The galaxy’s magnified spectra were detected independently by both Keck Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope data.

Contacts and sources:

Stuart Wolpert

UCLA

Source:

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