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  • Lecture liveblog: Richard Ellis

    Lectures
    11th July 2007 - By chrislintott

    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

    HST image of field with new objects marked.

    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.

  • 5 Comments to “Lecture liveblog: Richard Ellis”

    • Andy Lawrence on July 11, 2007

      Hi Chris

      I was there too .. did you spot the bit of filming that occured during Richard’s talk ? Richard told me just after that he thinks this will be on the 6 o’clock BBC news. Oooh gosh look at the time – I am probably just missing it ..

      Do remember we have been here before… ESO issued a press release in 2004 about a z=10 galaxy but it went away…

    • Robin on July 12, 2007

      Spotted this on the news last night (along with Chris explaining GalaxyZoo) including I think, (it was very brief) some images annotated with Ly alpha
      shifted from the UV far into the micron wavelength region – cool!

      Robin

    • Doctor Science on July 17, 2007

      I had this galaxy pop up for me on GalaxyZoo, and if I’m reading the data right it has z=0.596. How much deeper will we zoo assistants be able to see?

    • Chris Lintott’s Universe » A week inside the Galaxy Zoo on July 18, 2007

      [...] More emails to answer, half of them while sitting through the announcement of the most distant galaxies yet seen (wifi in lecture theatres is A Good Thing). [...]

    • Almost meeting famous people « The e-Astronomer on October 1, 2007

      [...] But suddenly up pops fame again. Not only did Brian May give a cogent talk on Zodiacal Dust, he added a movie he made of the dust being made in solar system collisions, complete with grandiose guitar sound track. And two days later Richard Ellis started his talk accompanied by a BBC film crew, Caltech having issued a press release about the six faint smudges that MIGHT be redshift ten galaxies. I got back to my room and thought well I can blog about that. But of course Chris Lintott, who was also there, had already done it. [...]

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