Spitzer discovers strange new "species" of ultra-red galaxies

All I want to say is Steve Armstrong from Calif. I had to dig out my dictionary to read your comment! Good on you.

Steve says: "THAT light left the galaxies 13 billion years ago, when the galaxies and us were only separated by 2 billion light years on God's tape measure. .... So, when the light reached our ORIGINAL POSITION (where we were 2 billion years prior), we were no longer there! We had moved away (by both physical motion and Hubble expansion) by almost 1.5 BILLION light years!"

Where do these ideas come from? If the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago??? then no observable matter could have been more than 700,000 light years from our part of the U 13 billion years ago. Those 700,000 light-years of space were expanding at c. Some space was expanding faster than c, but light emitter by any matter in that space can't be seen here. Space with a diameter of 2 meters at the BB, expanding at the speed of light, can't be more than 27.4 billion light years across in 13.7 billion years

Comments enjoyed and appreciated!! If we get off our present "rock" in time to avoid destruction, WE WILL EVENTUALLY LEARN TO MOVE SWIFTLY ABOUT OUR NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE UNIVERSE. Time is our greatest impediment, and we have no idea how to speed up our "learning" prosses. We can use all the "help" we can get---from whatever source.

They've all been sucked into a black hole. The last guy out turned off the lights.

Why is it that we always assume that the speed of light is a constant. We know that light slows down when going through different materials, hence the refractive index, but suppose that the speed of light is slower further away in the universe, would that not give us a different expansion rate than what we think we see by measuring the red shift?

ALL I CAN SAY IS THAT GOD MADE THE UNIVERSE IN SEVEN DAYS AND THAT I CANNOT ACCEPT THAT THE UNIVERSE HAS ANY LIMITS BECAUSE IF THERE WHERE LIMITS, OUT OF WHAT WOULD IT EXIST AND WHAT WILL BE BEYOND THAT. I AM A CHRISTIAN AND SO DOES NOT BELIEVE THAT THE UNIVERSE HAVE LIMITS. I HOPE THAT THERE ARE SOMEBODY WHO AGREE WITH ME, THANKYOU.

The galaxies are NOT 13 billion light years away; they are actually more like 60 billion light years away. If you were God, and were not bound by the speed of light, you could take a tape measure and determine this FACT. However, since we ARE bound by the speed of light, we can only SENSE the light that left the surface of these galaxies. THAT light left the galaxies 13 billion years ago, when the galaxies and us were only separated by 2 billion light years on God's tape measure. THEN, that light travelled for 2 billion years towards us. BUT, during that 2 BILLION YEARS, there was some spatial motion that further separated us from those galaxies, as well as space itself expanding by the Hubble constant. So, when the light reached our ORIGINAL POSITION (where we were 2 billion years prior), we were no longer there! We had moved away (by both physical motion and Hubble expansion) by almost 1.5 BILLION light years! So, now we start the race anew, with a somewhat less distance to travel for THE SAME LIGHT to once again to try to catch up with us. After about 6 iterations of this 4-steps-forward-3-steps-back game, the ORIGINAL LIGHT finally reaches our telescopes after 13 billion years of travel time. And, this effect is EXPONENTIAL, meaning it gets worse the farther the ORIGINAL DISTANCE was. Essentially, given enough INITIAL SEPARATION, there is a distinct cut-off point where we will NEVER, EVER see distant galaxies. This effect is DISTINCT AND DIFFERENT from the way CURRENTLY OBSERVABLE galaxies will begin to "disappear" or "blink-out" from our view. THAT effect is intrinsically restricted to our LOCAL VIEW of the OBSERVABLE universe. Other weird effects occur, also, and are best explained by Bob Berman's previous article in Astronomy magazine. This observational cut-off point may well and correctly be referred to as our "bubble's boundary". We can NEVER, EVER know of anything existing beyond this limit. Ironically, that boundary may have been established when those now-impossible-to-detect galaxies were merely 4 billion light years away (on God's tape measure) 11 billion years ago. Yes, it's a bit counter intuitive, but 35 years ago, on a VIC-20 computer, I wrote a very simple program that kept track of a travelling light ray moving from on point source to another. With the SMALLEST SEPARATING MOTION per iteration between the point sources that I could program (as determined by the smallest decimal that the computer would accept - 9 decimal places), and WITHOUT TAKING HUBBLE EXPANSION INTO EFFECT, I determined that the universe can be NO LESS THAN 52 BILLION LIGHT YEARS ACROSS. The OBSERVABLE universe MUST be at least big enough to contain ALL THE LIGHT EVER GENERATED. If there were ever only just one single ORIGINAL source of light, the universe MUST be 26 billion LY across just to contain THAT light. Now, imagine two light sources at the very boundary and on opposite points of that 26 billion LY universe. Well, THOSE point sources ALSO NEED a 26 billion LY universe to contain the light that THEY EMITTED! THAT light (from THOSE 2 point sources) had an existing 26 billion LY universe in which to travel INWARD (from the universe delineated by the ORIGINAL single point source). BUT, those two point sources also require a universe to radiate OUTWARD! So, we need ANOTHER 13 billion LY of universe on either side of the ORIGINAL 26 billion LY universe, totalling a 52 billion LY MINIMUM size for our OBSERVABLE universe, assuming ONLY THREE LIGHT SOURCES! Now, imagine the mathematics for the billions of observable point sources. NOW, imagine the mathematics when we include the impossible-to-EVER-observe galaxies previously discussed. This leads us to the inevitable conclusion that the universe MUST be infinite. No matter where one is located, one can NEVER know where it all ends. This is the penultimate definition on infinity. But this is NOT a surprising or groundbreaking assertion. Imagine "folding up" a two-dimensional finite plane, with infinite thinness, ad infinitum. "Folding" it once, being infinitely thin, doesn't increase its "thickness" on iota! But "folding" an INFINITE amount of times DOES increase its "thickness"! Since "thickness" DOES NOT EXIST IN TWO DIMENSIONS, the only "place" for the "thickness" to "go" is into a third SPATIAL dimension. Once this happens, it is SIMPLE TO DEDUCE that an infinite plane can "fit" into a FINITE SPACE that has even the SLIGHTEST INKLING of a third spatial length. Or, in other words, Flatland could easily fit into a cube measuring 10 to the -100 femtometers on each side. SIMILARLY, our deduciblely infinite 3-d "Fatland", "folded up", would so very easily be contained by a 4-d cube measuring 10 to the -100 femtometers per side, as well. You could say that 3-d "space" has "infinite area", and that 4-d "volume" has "infinite space"! So there is PLENTY of "room" in our universe, even past our OBSERVABLE BUBBLE, to contain the majesty that IS infinity. Infinite space. Infinite mass. Infinite mass OUTSIDE OF OUR OBSERVABLE BUBBLE! Is it any wonder that our OBSERVABLE universe bubble is expanding ever rapidly? It is mathematically REQUIRED TO DO SO! Compared to infinity, our OBSERVABLE universe has ZERO mass in comparison to what lies outside of our observable bubble. 4.7 billion years ago, the gravity of our LOCAL concentration of mass in our observable universe lost out to the pull of INFINITE mass outside of our observable bubble. Thus began the irreversible expansion of our bubble into the infinite, never-observable 4-d "volume". The only question remaining is one for both the scientists and the priests: Is it only mere coincidence that our little Eden here on Earth formed at EXACTLY THE SAME POINT IN TIME? (Wouldn't it be a hoot if it weren't?)

When we look at galaxies 13 bil ly away, we are really not looking very far. Doesn't this just mean that we are seeing EARLY galaxies, from when the universe was new? So isn't this giving us clues as to how the first galaxies formed and their make-up?

I'm not going to lose sleep over it, because they are vastly different today. They could be dustier because there was more dust floating around way back then? The big stars could have been forming fast and blowing up faster then, than today, due to the greater overall density of the early universe. There could have been a lot of older stars because the first generation hadn't had a chance to blow up yet? The universe has grown a lot since then, so a lot of red shifting has occurred.