Chris Lintott’s Universe

I’m currently in a talk by Richard Ellis of Caltech as part of this Imperial college organised conference. He’s expected to announce the discovery of the most distant objects known. Currently he’s arguing that many stars, some of them old are in place by a redshift of 6, the most distant epoch we’ve seen in detail to date.

Now talking about work by graduate student Dan Spark to look for objects at a redshift of 10. First, look for galaxy clusters and look for faint things within them, in the hope that you’ll see distant objects which have been magnified by their light’s passage through the foreground cluster.

…they found lots of faint candidates. Now they have to show that the emission is really from a galaxy at that distance…Oh, very nice. As well as magnifying the galaxies, the lensing by the foreground cluster moves the position of the galaxy, and this depends on distance. Using this fact and lots more observing time they can attempt to rule out other possibilities. This distance does depend, for now, on the detection of a single spectral line, however.

Here’s the image

Is it surprising that so many were seen? Work with Avi Loeb (a theorist) seems to show that there are about 2-3 times more of these than predicted, but can make the star formation more efficient to solve this problem. And that seems to be it – I hope it’s true so I can say I was here, but it would be nice (As Richard said) to have a little more confirmation.

I’ve been absolutely stunned by the initial reaction to Galaxy Zoo; so many emails with so many fantastic images. Perhaps my favourite, found by beccamecca13 whoever she (or he) may be, is below, but there’s lots more where that came from. We’re on BBC News and if your hands strayed toward the ‘email your friends’ button let’s just say that would be appreciated.

Update: We’re being slightly swamped. Please keep telling people about the site, but bear with us if you can’t see any galaxies. We’ll upgrade as soon as possible.