Latest Redshift Stories
New measurements have confirmed Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity after an experiment last week brought the theory into question. Einstein's general theory of relativity says that light emitted from stars and galaxies is slightly tugged by gravity from celestial bodies. Physicists reported last week that neutrinos can travel faster than light, which sent a blow to Einstein's theory of special relativity. The particles in the experiments conducted between the European...
A CSIRO study has shown why the lights are going out in the Universe. The Universe forms fewer stars than it used to, and a CSIRO study has now shown why - the galaxies are running out of gas. Dr. Robert Braun (CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science) and his colleagues used CSIRO’s Mopra radio telescope near Coonabarabran, NSW, to study far-off galaxies and compare them with nearby ones. Light (and radio waves) from the distant galaxies has taken time to travel to us, so we see the...
Scientists said on Wednesday that they have discovered the most distant quasar to date, thriving at a time when the Universe was less than 800 million years old. The object is around 100 million years younger than the previously known most distant quasar. Prior to its discovery, the most distant quasar was about 870 million years old. The scientists said the newly discovered object was around when the Universe was about 770 million years old, which is only five percent of its current...
Berkeley Lab-led BOSS proves it can do the job with quasarsThe biggest 3-D map of the distant universe ever made, using light from 14,000 quasars "“ supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies billions of light years away "“ has been constructed by scientists with the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III).The map is the first major result from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), SDSS-III's largest survey, whose principal investigator is David Schlegel of the...
Astronomers working with data from several observatories, including ESA's XMM-Newton, have discovered the most distant, mature galaxy cluster yet. The cluster is seen as it was when the Universe was only about a quarter of its current age. In contrast to other structures observed in the young Universe, this object is already in its prime, as is evident from its diffuse X-ray emission and evolved population of galaxies. This shows that fully-grown galaxy clusters were already in place this...
Thirteen billion years ago our universe was dark. There were neither stars nor galaxies; there was only hydrogen gas left over after the Big Bang. Eventually that mysterious time came to an end as the first stars ignited and their radiation transformed the nearby gas atoms into ions. This phase of the universe's history is called the Epoch of Reionization (EoR), and it is intimately linked to many fundamental questions in cosmology. But looking back so far in time presents numerous...
New findings disagree with current modelsSome of the universe's most massive galaxies may have formed billions of years earlier than current scientific models predict, according to surprising new research led by Tufts University. The findings appear in the Astrophysical Journal published online Nov. 24 in advance of print publication on Dec. 10, 2010."We have found a relatively large number of very massive, highly luminous galaxies that existed almost 12 billion years ago when the...
Submillimeter observatories penetrate cold, dusty galaxies to see stars forming in the primeval pastA chance alignment of galaxies, recently observed by a space observatory, presents the perfect opportunity for studying star-forming galaxies billions of light-years away.For decades, astronomers have used Einstein's concept of a "gravitational lens" to study the magnified images of distant objects. A lensing effect occurs when a massive object, such as a galaxy, is located...
A European team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has measured the distance to the most remote galaxy so far. By carefully analyzing the very faint glow of the galaxy they have found that they are seeing it when the Universe was only about 600 million years old (a redshift of 8.6). These are the first confirmed observations of a galaxy whose light is clearing the opaque hydrogen fog that filled the cosmos at this early time. The results were presented at an online press...
Seven years ago Northwestern University physicist Adilson E. Motter conjectured that the expansion of the universe at the time of the big bang was highly chaotic. Now he and a colleague have proven it using rigorous mathematical arguments.The study, published by the journal Communications in Mathematical Physics, reports not only that chaos is absolute but also the mathematical tools that can be used to detect it. When applied to the most accepted model for the evolution of the universe,...
Latest Redshift Reference Libraries
As of 2009, JKCS 041 is a group of galaxies with the distinction of being the farthest away group from Earth ever observed. Seen at redshift 1.9, it is estimated to be 10.2 billion light years away. The cluster is located within the constellation Cetus at a photometrically determined redshift of z=1.9 at right ascension 2h 26m 44s declination -04° 41"² 37"³ (J2000.0).
Large-Scale Structure of the Cosmos -- Stars are organised into galaxies which in turn appear to form clusters and superclusters, separated by voids. Prior to 1989 it was commonly assumed that the superclusters were the largest structures in existence, and that they were distributed more-or-less uniformly throughout the universe in every direction. However, in 1989, Margaret Geller and John Huchra discovered the "Great Wall", a sheet of galaxies more than 500 million light years long...
Cosmology -- area of science that aims at a comprehensive theory of the structure and evolution of the entire physical universe. Modern Cosmological Theories Present models of the universe hold two fundamental premises: the cosmological principle and the dominant role of gravitation. Derived by Hubble, the cosmological principle holds that if a large enough sample of galaxies is considered, the universe looks the same from all positions and in all directions in space. The second point...
Redshift -- Redshift is the phenomenon that the frequency of light when observed, under certain circumstances, can be lower than the frequency of light when it was emitted at the source. This usually occurs when the source moves away from the observer, as in the Doppler effect. More specifically, the term redshift is used for the observation that the spectrum of light emitted by distant galaxies is shifted to lower frequencies (towards the red end of the spectrum, hence the name) when...
Quasar -- A quasar (from quasi-stellar radio source) is an astronomical object that looks like a star in optical telescopes (i.e. it is a point source), but has a very high redshift. The general consensus is that this high redshift is cosmological, the result of Hubble's law and that their redshift indicates that they are typically very distant from Earth; we observe them as they were several billions of years ago. Since we can see them despite their distance, they must emit more...
![Composite X-ray and optical image of the high-redshift galaxy cluster SPT-CL J2342-5411, with contours depicting the region of the Sunyaev-Zel\](/media/gallery/xmm-newton/thumbs/thumbs_2342-xosze_orig.jpg "Composite X-ray and optical image of the high-redshift galaxy cluster SPT-CL J2342-5411, with contours depicting the region of the Sunyaev-Zel\")
