July 11, 2007 — The faint, mangled light of what appear to be some of the first galaxies in the universe has been captured by astronomers using a combination of manmade and natural telescopes.
The light from the galaxies is more than 13 billion years old, coming from a time when the universe was a fledgling 500 million years old. The manmade telescope was the mammoth 10-meter Keck II telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
Nature’s telescope came in the form of clusters of galaxies that are in the middle ground between Earth and the most distant early galaxies. The gravity of the clusters bends the stretched out, "red-shifted" light of the most distant galaxies and focuses it towards Earth — acting like cosmic magnifying glass.
"While we don't have a lot of information on these galaxies yet, we think what we're seeing is starlight," said Caltech astronomer Daniel Stark, lead author of a report on the discovery in a recent issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The other possibility is that the light is from a quasar — which is the light emitted from the edge of giant black hole in the process of eating great gobs of matter.
But previous surveys of quasars suggest that they become rarer and rarer in the universe the further back you look. This only makes sense, since at a few hundred million years old, the universe didn’t have time to grow a lot of super-massive black holes yet.
