They used images from the UltraVISTA survey, one of six projects using VISTA to survey the sky at near - infrared wavelengths, and made a census of
faint galaxies when the age of the Universe was between just 0.75 and 2.1 billion years old.
Not exact matches
Many other potential applications of this dataset are explored in the series of papers, and they include studying the role of
faint galaxies during cosmic reionisation (starting just 380,000 years after the Big Bang),
galaxy merger rates
when the Universe was young, galactic winds, star formation as well as mapping the motions of stars in the early Universe.
When the cobe satellite in 1992 mapped the
faint microwave glow left over from the Big Bang, it couldn't make out structures as small as individual
galaxies, or even clusters of
galaxies.
Scientists can only see the
faintest dwarf
galaxies when they are nearby, and had previously only found a few of them.
Lawrence Rudnick, the astronomer who led the team that found the void, was studying data from the Very Large Array, a network of 27 radio antennas in New Mexico,
when he spotted a gap in the constellation Eridanus where radio signals from
galaxies appear unusually
faint.
They look off to the side
when examining
faint galaxies or trying to spot dim stars.
Planets, nebulae, and
galaxies appear wan and
faint when eyed through a backyard telescope.
When complete, ALMA will be even more sensitive, and will be able to detect even
fainter galaxies, but for now the astronomers targeted the brightest of them.
When complete, ALMA will be even more sensitive, and will be able to detect even
fainter galaxies.
«The surprising aspect about the present discovery is that we have detected this Lyman - alpha line in an apparently
faint galaxy at a redshift of 8.68, corresponding to a time
when the universe should be full of absorbing hydrogen clouds,» Richard Ellis, a former faculty member of the California Institute of Technology, and co-author of a paper detailing the findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement.
«The surprising aspect about the present discovery is that we have detected this Lyman - alpha line in an apparently
faint galaxy at a redshift of 8.68, corresponding to a time
when the Universe should be full of absorbing hydrogen clouds,» said co-author and Caltech astronomer Richard Ellis.
Knowing the abundance of oxygen in the
galaxy called COSMOS - 1908 is an important stepping stone toward allowing astronomers to better understand the population of
faint, distant
galaxies observed
when the Universe was only a few billion years old, Shapley said.