The excited “missing link” quote is from a NASA astronomer, in an announcement press release.
The referenced paper is published here in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
How exciting is this news? Could someone translate what’s going on, and implications?
Thanks,
Leo
OK, ‘ultra-red’ just means ‘really extremely red’; according to the abstract (that’s what academics call ‘tl;dr’) of the paper, that could be caused by dust or by red-shifting, and they have reasons to doubt it’s dust. So that leaves red-shifting, which is what happens when a source of radiation (electromagnetic or, with some re-interpretation, sound) is moving away from you. Something that is red-shifted into the ultra-red, therefore, is moving away from you like you’re the angry MMA champion whose wallet he just stole.
Now, Hubble (the guy the telescope is named after) discovered that, due to how the Universe is expanding, the faster something is moving away from us, the farther away it is. This has the effect that, because light travels at a fixed speed, the farther something away from us is, the longer it took that thing’s light to reach us, so the older it is. Think of it like how mail worked in 19th Century London: You’d get a letter from across town the same day, a letter from Dublin the next day (I’m guessing), and a letter from New Delhi would be fast if it arrived within a month (again, a guess). So the latest mail from points progressively farther away reflects times progressively longer ago.
So the upshot is, if this is really ultra-red due to redshift, it’s a look into the deep and distant past, at how galaxies were a very, extremely long time ago.
AFAIK these reports don’t mean a larger or older universe. The ultra red galaxies are reported as being 13 billion light years away, which fits into existing cosmology. They’re galaxies which formed in the first billion years after the big bang.
So what’s the really big news, if any? First time such distant/close-to-birth galaxies have ever been discovered?
Sooo it sounds to me like ancient galaxies move faster than present day galaxies. I guess gravity happened.
From what I read in the OP’s links, it sounds like neither speed nor dust can fully explain the red-shift and that it is likely to be a result of many old or cool stars (i.e. stars that had reddish light to begin with). If very early galaxies had a different proportion of stars than modern ones, that would be very interesting information.
Nope, Hubble already found older galaxies:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-20029699-239.html