extremely high redshift galaxies found
Garth Illingworth gave a talk this morning, the first of two, on new extremely high redshift galaxies found in the Ultra Deep Field using combined ACS, NICMOS and Spitzer data.
Second talk tomorrow by Rychard Bouwens on unpublished candidates.
So... the press release claim of the week is that A1689-zD1 a lensed galaxy by the cluster Abel 1689 is at redshift greater than 7.
Estimated redshift is 7.6, which has the galaxy formed within 700 million years of the Big Bang. Galaxy was lensed by a factor of about 10 by the foreground cluster.
Another published galaxy in the Ultra Deep Field (unlensed) is estimated at redshift 7.4, and if its redshift, when finally established by spectra, is found to be less than 7 then Garth owes me, and about 70 other people, a nice cold beer.
Rumour is that tomorrow we will get the rundown on 8 more candiate objects which appear to be galaxies with redshifts between 7 and 10.
That is enough to get a luminosity function at redshift > 7, a measure of the volume density of luminous (> 0.3 L* or roughly brighter than the Milky Way, in the ultra-violet) galaxies at this early time.
Data are already good enough to establish that the luminosity density at z>7 is significantly lower than at z>6, which is not surprising, it is hard to get enough stuff together that quickly to make a respectable galaxy.
click for high res image
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Thank you, Steinn Sigur�sson. That was wonderful!
Now, as I'm tied up trying to edit down 125 pages of draft paper to 4 pages of submittable to "Nature" paper, who wants to write the great Science Fiction novel set in a galaxy formed within 700 million years of the Big Bang?
Dave Brin? Greg Bear? Greg Benford? Iain M. Banks? Stephen Baxter?
And that's just the plausible B's.
Remember, superscientists Carl Sagan and Kip S. Thorne both got film deals with Lynda Obst, the latter [Interstellar (2009)] having Steven Spielberg attached. And superscientist Stephen Hawking got to appear in the Errol Morris adaptation of A Brief History of Time (1991), which yielded the anomaly of "the book based on the movie based on the book."
Hint: the Writers Guild strike is over. Think Feature Film. Think miniseries. Think Franchise.
I'll take an "from an idea by" credit, please.
"who wants to write the great Science Fiction novel set in a galaxy formed within 700 million years of the Big Bang?"
Wouldn't you have a bit of a metallicity deficit back then?
I think Larry will cover the z drop in 1689, Rychard will cover the field surveys.
Larry's object might be bright enough to get a spectrum of. Can one get two press releases out of one object?
Dude, check this out, extra-solar jupiters and saturns
I glanced at the schedule for this summer, I think I know where some will be spending part of his summer.
Ah, ok I forgot Larry was speaking today, I remember Garth mentioning the 7.4 was no longer the probably record holder.
I saw the OGLE press release, couldn't find time to do it justice.
And, yeah, the summer could be interesting. and expensive.
My spies inform me that Rychard will mention the 1689 object, but in a somewhat different context (why lensing is a lousy way to find a lot of high z galaxies).