NASA | JPL-Caltech | Spitzer | 2014 Sep 09
A new survey of galaxies by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is taking a plunge into the deep and uncharted waters of our cosmos. In one of the longest surveys the telescope will have ever performed, astronomers have begun a three-month expedition trawling for faint galaxies billions of light-years away.
The results are already yielding surprises.
"If you think of our survey as fishing for galaxies in the cosmic sea, then we are finding many more big fish in deep waters than previously expected," said Charles Steinhardt of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Steinhardt is lead author of a new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
These early results from the SPLASH project, an international effort officially called the Spitzer Large Area Survey with Hyper-Suprime-Cam, build on previous evidence from Spitzer and other telescopes showing that the universe's earliest galaxies are more massive than expected. The project is turning up hundreds of hefty galaxies 100 times the mass of our own Milky Way, dating back to a time when our universe was less than one billion years old. (Our universe is 13.8 billion years old.)
The findings cast doubt on current models of galaxy formation, which struggle to explain how these remote and young galaxies grew so big so fast. ...
Star Formation at 4<z<6 From the Spitzer Large Area Survey with Hyper-Suprime-Cam (SPLASH) - Charles L. Steinhardt et al
- Astrophysical Journal Letters 791(2) L25 (2014 Aug 20) DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/791/2/L25
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1407.7030 > 25 Jul 2014
