March 2, 2005
STRUCTURED, NOT SURPRISINGLY:
Young Universe Was Surprisingly Structured (Universe Today, Mar 2, 2005)
Combining observations with ESO's Very Large Telescope and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, astronomers have discovered the most distant, very massive structure in the Universe known so far.Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2005 3:22 PMIt is a remote cluster of galaxies that is found to weigh as much as several thousand galaxies like our own Milky Way and is located no less than 9,000 million light-years away.
The VLT images reveal that it contains reddish and elliptical, i.e. old, galaxies. Interestingly, the cluster itself appears to be in a very advanced state of development. It must therefore have formed when the Universe was less than one third of its present age.
The discovery of such a complex and mature structure so early in the history of the Universe is highly surprising. Indeed, until recently it would even have been deemed impossible.
Does this mean we really don't know what we don't know? Or the more we learn, the more we should realize we should have known?
Posted by: John Resnick at March 2, 2005 4:10 PMThe more we know the more we realize we don't know anything our ancestors didn't know--in fact know less because we think we know better.
Posted by: oj at March 2, 2005 4:18 PM OJ
So true.Iknow some of my ancetors. They were so much stronger and better people than me. It shames me. Living off their capital.
Sorry about the typo. My "ancetors" also drank a little whiskey too.
Posted by: jdkelly at March 2, 2005 7:38 PMWell, we know that women, blacks and Jews are full-fledged human beings.
And there never was any such thing as witches.
Those seem pretty substantial things.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at March 2, 2005 11:05 PMI know what you're saying, Orrin. My granfather was fond of telling me of how his father, after a grueling day at the textile mill, would sit around the kitchen table and go on about how the early universe must have been quite orderly, even at one third of its current age.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at March 2, 2005 11:41 PMThe very early universe appears to be very smooth (the Big Bang era) yet here we see immense structure not much later on. What we don't know is how that happens.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at March 3, 2005 12:52 AMJeff:
Of course there were witches. Witchcraft just doesn't work. Rather few people know that even today though.
Posted by: oj at March 3, 2005 1:09 AMOne-third of the Universe's present age is still a pretty long time.
But of course we know quite a bit more about this now than as recently as 1963, when our measurements were so coarse that the cosmic background radiation seemed featureless.
With better instrumentation, we've known for a while now that it was not so smooth, so structures necessarily follow.
We can now, I suppose, infer from these large structures just how uneven the background had to be. Then we can check that prediction against our measurements.
It's an interesting discussion, to people of a certain frame of mind. Too bad Orrin cannot take part.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at March 3, 2005 1:43 AM"Of course there were witches. Witchcraft just doesn't work."
Read The Witches' Hammer. Not even the whole thing. Just the part that takes it as a matter of Faith that witches exist, and that witchcraft works.
So, presuming you disagree, that means you know something your forebears did not. Even though they took it on Faith.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at March 3, 2005 10:50 PMWitches do exist and should be burned.
Posted by: oj at March 3, 2005 11:01 PM