* Astronomy

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SDSS J1004+4112

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Four Gravitationally Lensed Quasars

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RE: Distant Galaxies

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Astronomers say they may have detected the light from some of the earliest stars to form in the Universe.
They have pictures of what appear to be very faint galaxies that shone more than 13 billion years ago, a mere 500 million years after the Big Bang.
The remarkable claim dramatically exceeds the current, broadly accepted record for the most distant detection.
The Caltech-led team behind the work recognises there will be sceptics but says it believes its data is strong.

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It has published details in The Astrophysical Journal; and the group leader, Professor Richard Ellis, has been arguing the case at a conference in London, UK.

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Using natural "gravitational lenses," an international team of astronomers claim to have found the first traces of a population of the most distant galaxies yet seen-the light we see from them today left more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was just 500 million years old.
Team leader Richard Ellis, the Steele Family Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, will present images of these faint and distant objects in his talk on July 11 at the "From IRAS to Herschel and Planck" conference at the Geological Society in London. The meeting is being held to celebrate the 65th birthday of Royal Astronomical Society President Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson.

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A selection of Hubble Space Telescope images show cluster fields with distant galaxy sources marked with circles. Each foreground cluster of galaxies acts as a natural telescope with particularly strong magnification along the `critical lines' indicated here with black curves.
Credit: Caltech\D. Stark, J. Richard, R. Ellis

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A high magnification scan of the heavens may have captured faint light from 13-billion-year-old galaxies
Astronomers say they have discovered a handful of relatively small galaxies that date to 500 million years after the big bang, or several hundred million years earlier than the previous oldest galaxies. The ancient objects may have initiated a key event called reionisation that led to the clumping of small galaxies into larger ones.

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GRAVITATIONAL LENSING: Astronomers have spotted what may be the oldest galaxies yet (red circles) by training a powerful telescope on light passing near closer galaxies (dark spots), which focus the light along certain contours in the sky (black lines).
Credit STARK ET AL

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Astronomers using a giant telescope say they have found glimpses of the most distant - and oldest - galaxies ever seen, a finding that will help provide clues to the origins of the universe.
The light the researchers viewed originated when the universe was only 500 million years old and has been travelling through distant space for billions of years.
This means the team found galaxies further back in time than anyone has ever seen as scientists try to better understand how the universe was born some 13.5 billion years ago.

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Astronomers have spotted the most distant galaxies known, from an era when the universe was just 4% its present age. Objects like these could be responsible for lifting the veil on the so-called cosmic 'dark ages', by making the universe transparent to light.
Because it takes light from distant galaxies billions of years to reach us, we see them as they were long ago, when the universe was much younger. Astronomers gauge their distance using a metric called redshift, which measures how much the expansion of the universe has stretched out the wavelength of their light as it travelled to Earth.
Previously, the most distant galaxy known had been found at a redshift of 7 corresponding to a time when the universe was about 750 million years old.
Now, astronomers led by Daniel Stark of Caltech in Pasadena, California, US, have found several galaxies at a redshift of about 9. A redshift of 9 corresponds to an era just 500 million years after the big bang 4% the universe's present age of 13.7 billion years.

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The most distant galaxies ever detected have been detected by astronomers using the 10-meter Keck II telescope at Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii.
The galaxies were seen when they were only 500 million years old. They are more than 13 billion years away.
The six galaxies were detected using a natural "gravitational lens" of a nearby cluster of galaxies.

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Credit: Caltech

"Gravitational lensing is the magnification of distant sources by foreground structures. By looking through carefully selected clusters, we have located six star-forming galaxies seen at unprecedented distances, corresponding to a time when the universe was only 500 million years old, or less than 4 percent of its present age" - Richard Ellis, Caltech astronomer

The team will present their findings tomorrow at a conference of the Geological Society in London.

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Star-forming galaxies