Spitzer Spots Strange Ultra-Red Galaxies

Epoch Times Staff

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has sighted four remarkably red galaxies nearly 13 billion light-years away.

The infrared telescope was able to detect the galaxies through the dust and distance, unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which has less powerful infrared instruments. When viewed in infrared, they are over 60 times brighter than the reddest colors Hubble can see.

However, the astronomers who discovered them cannot explain what makes them so red.  “We’ve had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations,” study lead author Jiasheng Huang of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) said in a press release.  Possible reasons are an abundance of dust or old red stars. Alternatively, they may be redshifted due to extreme distance stretching their light into longer wavelengths as the universe expands.

to be physically connected.

They are so far away that we are observing them in the state they existed about 1 billion years after the big bang, when the first galaxies are thought to have formed.

“Hubble has shown us some of the first protogalaxies that formed, but nothing that looks like this,” said study co-author Giovanni Fazio of the CfA in the release.

“In a sense, these galaxies might be a ‘missing link’ in galactic evolution.”

The scientists intend to accurately measure the galaxies’ redshift using a more powerful telescope like the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, and search for other galaxies like these.

“There’s evidence for others in other regions of the sky,” Fazio said. “We’ll analyze more Spitzer and Hubble observations to track them down.”

The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Nov. 20.