Space Warps Talk

What is that deep red mirrored object?

  • Pythagora by Pythagora

    Just southeast of dead center--an unusually concentrated dark red in the shape of two mirroring fans. You need to zoom in to see it. What is it?

    There are also twin dots (small) of a similar deep red in the bottom left hand corner. They seem more normal. The twin fans do not seem normal. Never saw anything like that before.

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  • Tonibee by Tonibee

    I'm not an astronomer but I don't think it's possible to make that kind of analysis. These are low quality two-dimensional images of virtually infinite numbers of vastly distant intestellar objects. Someone will find Elvis one day...

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  • drphilmarshall by drphilmarshall scientist, admin

    Those galaxies are probably just galaxies - except their very red colour and very low brightness could mean they are a very long way from us indeed! An object that doesn't show up in the g or r bands (that's the blue or green image channels here) is called an r-band dropout - typical star forming galaxies don't emit light bluer than the lyman break at 90 nm, so if they are at redshift 7 they appear very faint at wavelengths below 90*(1+7) = 720nm, ie in the r band and bluer. Now, this isn't the only reason galaxies can appear faint and red -they could be heavily obscured by dust, buts its one reason. BTW the light we see from galaxies at redshift 7 today was emitted when the universe was one eighth it's current size - more than ten billion years ago.

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  • drphilmarshall by drphilmarshall scientist, admin

    The two brighter red objects are probably stars in our galaxy I think - but I'm not sure. What colour would brown dwarfs be in the space warps images? BTW you can read more about the lyman break technique here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman-break_galaxy I may have some of my numbers slightly wrong 😃

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