A galaxy that shouldn't exist? Holy sun in a pizza oven in the middle of July!

[MutilationSystem]

http://io9.com/5927315/hubble-has-sp...shouldnt-exist

To sum it up:

-Perfect spiral and massive galaxy found
-Approximately 10.7 billion years old, 3 billion years after Big Bang
-That is MUCH quicker than the formations of other spiral galaxies (including ours)
-Why shouldn't it exist? It's like having a 5 year old graduate high school. Very early.

Hooray for nerd stuff that I find interesting! Maybe Alien theories will come up soon.

[sillystou]

OMFG. How did they find my previous home? I thought I hid it well enough...

[MutilationSystem]

You can't hide something that big. You aliens and your poor logic, tsk tsk.

[jibjqrkl]

luckily they didn't find my galaxy that i hid behind it yet ._.

[MutilationSystem]

luckily they didn't find my galaxy that i hid behind it yet ._.

I must alert the authorities ._.

[topdrawer]

how do they know how old it is and how old is the big bang? what's the dating methodology? how do they know this is weird, what if in a far region of space this is very common and what we see from here are irregularities?

[GNFfhqwhgads]

how do they know how old it is and how old is the big bang?

Dating via heat/light/etc. in space.

how do they know this is weird, what if in a far region of space this is very common and what we see from here are irregularities?

We don't 'know' it's weird. You seem to be confusing saying something in space is weird with it definitely being weird. It's weird because we didn't expect it to be possible, just like it'd be weird if it became common.

No one ever claimed to 'know' it was weird, that's just how we can spell it out in layman's terms so other people can grasp that it's irregular based on what we've seen.

[darkwinterbeast8]

It could be that this galaxy is the result of a couple of galaxies smashing into each other; Kind of like what scientists theorize will happen to the Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy.

[MutilationSystem]

how do they know how old it is and how old is the big bang? what's the dating methodology? how do they know this is weird, what if in a far region of space this is very common and what we see from here are irregularities?

The Big Bang is a guess, really (in the astrology world, a well agreed upon on guess), but knowing how old it isn't too hard to find out.

If something in space is X years old, it means that we are observing its light as it was X years ago. So it means that light needs X years to reach us, thus the age of something is also representative of its distance to us.

Of course, that means our galaxy and this new one are operating in 2 separate dimensions of time. Going from here to there or there to here is literally time travel.

[TheBonobo4]

You meant astronomical world, astrology is something different.


Yes, this is odd. I'd need to look into it in more detail, but it sounds like an anomaly or perhaps a new theory will be required?


As for the distance. Basically as has been explained before the light from that galaxy takes 1 year to travel 1 light-year, hence the name of the term. So basically if we know how far it is or how long light takes to get there, we can know the other.