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A 'normal' galaxy that goes the distance.


In the 1960s, astronomers identified a group of objects that rank among the most distant in the observable universe This article or section may contain inappropriate or misinterpreted which do not the text.
Please help [ improve this article] by checking for inaccuracies.
 -- quasars Proper naming of quasars are by Catalogue Entry, Qxxxx±yy using B1950 coordinates, or QSO Jxxxx±yyyy using J2000 coordinates.

This page lists quasars.
  • 3C 449
  • 3C 48
  • 3C 212
  • 3C 273
  • QSO J1819+3845
  • QSO 2237+0305
  • Q0957+561
  • QSO J0842+1835
  • 3C 9
 that glow brilliantly in visible light and at radio wavelengths. Two decades later, researchers detected very distant galaxies that broadcast radio waves Radio waves
Electromagnetic energy of the frequency range corresponding to that used in radio communications, usually 10,000 cycles per second to 300 billion cycles per second.
 at high intensity. Now scientists have added a more mundane, less luminous object to their list of faraway bodies--a faint, radio-quiet galaxy that could be the youthful counterpart of such run-of-the-mill galaxies as our own Milky Way Milky Way, the galaxy of which the sun and solar system are a part, seen as a broad band of light arching across the night sky from horizon to horizon; if not blocked by the horizon, it would be seen as a circle around the entire sky. .

David Turnshek of the University of Pittsburgh and his colleagues spied the faint galaxy using the European Southern Observatory's 3.6-meter telescope at La Serena, Chile La Serena ("the serene one") is the second oldest city in Chile. The city, located 471 km north of Santiago, has a population of 147,815, according to the 2002 census. There are also 12,333 inhabitants of the immediately surrounding countryside. . Since looking into deep space is the same as peering back in time, the galaxy's great distance from Earth -- 11.4 billion light-years, according to one model -- indicates that astronomers are viewing the body as it appeared when the universe was just 13 percent of its current age. Moreover, the galaxy appears to reside amid a cluster of other bodies, including a huge cloud of hydrogen gas previously discovered by Cyril Hazard, also at Pittsburgh. Turnshek suspects the gas cloud, as glimpsed through the telescope, had just begun forming a new galaxy.

Other surveys that have scanned large regions of the sky for distant, quiescent galaxies have failed to find them because the faraway bodies appear extremely faint, Turnshek says. Rather than looking at a big swatch of the sky, Turnshek and his team limited their study to the vicinity of the large, distant hydrogen cloud. He suggests that distant hydrogen clouds may be part of galactic clusters and are probably associated with faint, run-of-the-mill galaxies.

If further observations reveal that clusters of "normal" galaxies were at least as common as quasars in the early universe, Turnshek notes, then cosmologists will have to explain how so many different galaxy types formed relatively soon after the Big Bang big bang

Model of the origin of the universe, which holds that it emerged from a state of extremely high temperature and density in an explosive expansion 10 billion–15 billion years ago.
 -- the giant explosion believed to have begun the expansion of the cosmos.

Turnshek described his group's work earlier this month at an American Astronomical Society The American Astronomical Society (AAS, sometimes pronounced "double-A-S") is a US society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC.  meeting in Columbus, Ohio.
COPYRIGHT 1992 Science Service, Inc.
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Copyright 1992, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.

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Title Annotation:cluster over 11 billion light-years away
Publication:Science News
Article Type:Brief Article
Date:Jun 27, 1992
Words:341
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