An international team of astronomers has confirmed the most-distant known galaxy, GN-z11s, a hefty13.4 billion light years away, indicating it was shining just 400 million years or so after the Big Bang, along with a brief ultraviolet flare of a powerful gamma ray burst–a phenomenon never before observed in the extremely early universe–that was detected in data from the Keck 1 telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The astronomers used deep spectroscopic analysis, discovering an unusual higher-than-expected concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, ruling out a first-generation galaxy.
In the early 1980’s Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom from Weizmann Institute proposed a new theory, “the smoking gun” –a new theory of the universe’s structure that offers the most plausible alternative yet to dark matter– that defied the laws of gravity suggesting that galaxies are governed by modified dynamics rather than obeying the laws of Newton and of general relativity. “This theory became known as MOND for modified Newtonian Dynamics, Milgromian Dynamics, or “modified gravity”–a viable explanation for a cosmological dilemma: that galaxies appear to defy the long-accepted rules of gravity traced to Sir Isaac Newton in the late 1600’s. In short, the mathematics of gravity may hint at weirder phenomena than many thought.
Physicists have found that for the last 7 billion years or so — the anticipated halfway point of the lifetime of the cosmos – galactic expansion has been accelerating. Some unknown force is pushing the galaxies, adding energy to them. A force physicist have named “dark energy”.
“Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead were violet,” is how philosopher and science-fiction author Olaf Stapledon described the phenomena known as “redshift” in his science fiction novel, Star Maker, a history of life in the universe. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding, with most other galaxies moving away from us. Light from these galaxies is shifted to longer (further away and redder) wavelengths – in other words, it is red-shifted, a result of the expansion of the universe.
It’s been said that maps codify the miracle of existence. Often referred to as the “cosmic genome” project, the new Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created, filling in the most significant gaps in its history.
“It is a very curious object that we’ve never seen before. It looks strange and familiar at the same time,” said Dr. Tiantian Yuan, from Australia’s ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3-D) about image of an extremely rare type of galaxy, R5519,—described as a “cosmic ring of fire”—as it existed 11 billion years ago with a massive hole at its center with a diameter two billion times longer than the distance between the Earth and the Sun or three million times bigger than the diameter of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy Messier 87, which in 2019 became the first ever to be directly imaged. “It is making stars at a rate 50 times greater than the Milky Way,” added Yuan.
