Strange New 'Species' of Ultra-Red Galaxy Discovered

[n2doc]

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't spy it. It took the revealing power of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies. And while astronomers can describe the members of this new "species," they can't explain what makes them so ruddy.



"We've had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations," said Jiasheng Huang of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Huang is lead author on the paper announcing the find, which was published online by the Astrophysical Journal.

Spitzer succeeded where Hubble failed because Spitzer is sensitive to infrared light -- light so red that it lies beyond the visible part of the spectrum. The newfound galaxies are more than 60 times brighter in the infrared than they are at the reddest colors Hubble can detect.

Galaxies can be very red for several reasons. They might be very dusty. They might contain many old, red stars. Or they might be very distant, in which case the expansion of the universe stretches their light to longer wavelengths and hence redder colors (a process known as redshifting). All three reasons seem to apply to the newfound galaxies.

more

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111201125358.htm

[Downtown Hound]

1. Must be a communist galaxy. n/t

[phleshdef]

2. Oh no. Its like a nightmarish vision of a galactic electoral map!