A team of astronomers is proudly presenting its finding of 250 of the universe’s youngest galaxies, as their main tool Hubble catches glimpses of the Big Bang.
- The 250 galaxies allow us to see right into the birth of the universe
- New spin is added on the reionization theory
The team of astronomers is international and Swiss lead and it has discovered the smallest and faintest first generation dwarf galaxies. The head of the research team is Hakim Atek, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He has used the famous Hubble telescope for his study and what he found dazed everybody. 250 small galaxies were discovered, that existed only 600 – 900 million years after the Big Bang moment.
They also represent the largest collection of such dwarf galaxies discovered so far belonging to the time in cosmic history. Their light alone took more than 12 billion years to reach earth and, therefore, the Hubble telescope. This basically means the images we are seeing right now are not real time images of how the galaxies are looking right now. Instead, given they are so far away and it’s taken light so long to reach us, we are actually seeing images from the beginning of the universe.
The beginning of the universe also stands for the beginning of time. And it’s a wondrous thing to behold when you think about the fact that what you see seeing are pictures from the beginning of time, from the beginning of everything.
Also, analyzing the light coming from these small galaxies, the astronomers realized it could have played a very important part in the era of reionization, one of the darkest eras of the universe.
Not much is known about it, unfortunately. Only some details such as the fact that, after the Big Bang, the Universe was full of a very thick fog, made up of hydrogen gas. This is when the reionization era began, when that thick cloud of hydrogen gas began to disperse and the Universe started to become transparent to UV light.
The reason this is important is because had not the reionization process begun and had the universe not become transparent, light would not have been able to travel and we would not have been able to see absolutely anything outside our planet.
The small galaxies played an important part in the process of reionization, astronomers say. Their importance as actors in establishing the transparency of the universe should be recognized along with that of big galaxies.
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