Very interesting article! This is what’s great about science, as compared to (shall I dare say it) – religion.
We have religions, dozens of them, with most of them claiming to know everything about the origin of the cosmos. Unfortunately, they know nothing. Then we have science, which doesn’t claim to know everything; quite the contrary. Science is always searching for more information on which to build and solidify its claims. In this way it is “self-correcting.” As new evidence is found which challenges previous ideas those earlier propositions are eliminated and the new ones are then tested for validity. This process is then repeated over and over until the new findings are either determined to be solidly established as theories or abandoned should they prove to be flawed. This is the beauty of science; it is about searching for facts. Religion on the other hand isn’t concerned with facts whatsoever. Religions’ goals are to maintain an ignorant population which continues to believe in archaic and absurd claims, along with the promise of eternal life. And this, of course, comes with a fee!
Those of you fortunate enough to live in civilized societies with all their modern conveniences who still support religions, and their antiquated beliefs, might want to think about where you would be without science. Then look to other parts of the world where religions still dominate the landscape. Now ask yourselves, what is the value of religion? TGO
Refer to story below. Source: Associated Press
Wed Mar 24, 2:12 pm ET
PARIS (AFP) – Astronomers may have underestimated the tally of galaxies in some parts of the Universe by as much as 90 percent, according to a study reported on Wednesday in Nature, the weekly British science journal.
Surveys of the cosmos are based on a signature of ultraviolet light that turns out to be a poor indicator of what’s out there, its authors say.
In the case of very distant, old galaxies, the telltale light may not reach Earth as it is blocked by interstellar clouds of dust and gas — and, as a result, these galaxies are missed by the map-makers.
“Astronomers always knew they were missing some fraction of the galaxies… but for the first time we now have a measurement. The number of missed galaxies is substantial,” said Matthew Hayes of the University of Geneva’s observatory, who led the investigation.
Hayes’ team used the world’s most advanced optical instrument — Europe’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, which has four 8.2-metre (26.65-feet) behemoths — to carry out the experiment.
They turned two of the giants towards a well-studied area of deep space called the GOODS-South field.
The astronomers carried out two sets of observations in the same region, hunting for light emitted by galaxies born 10 billion years ago.
The first looked for so-called Lyman-alpha light, the classic telltale used to compile cosmic maps, named after its US discoverer, Theodore Lyman. Lyman-alpha is energy released by excited hydrogen atoms.
The second observation used a special camera called HAWK-1 to look for a signature emitted at a different wavelength, also by glowing hydrogen, which is known as the hydrogen-alpha (or H-alpha) line.
The second sweep yielded a whole bagful of light sources that had not been spotted using the Lyman-alpha technique.
They include some of the faintest galaxies ever found, forged at a time when the Universe was just a child.
The astronomers conclude that Lyman-alpha surveys may only spot just a tiny number of the total light emitted from far galaxies. Astonishingly, as many as 90 percent of such distant galaxies may go unseen in these exercises.
“If there are 10 galaxies seen, there could be a hundred there,” said Hayes.
The discovery could add powerfully to knowledge about the timeline by which stars and then galaxies formed.
“Now that we know how much light we’ve been missing, we can start to create far more accurate representations of the cosmos, understanding better how quickly stars have formed at different times in the life of the Universe,” co-author Miguel Mas-Hesse said in a press release issued by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
Only a small part of the light spectrum is visible to the human eye, which is why astronomers use ultraviolet, gamma and other radiation sources as additional sources for observation.
