{"id":18105,"date":"2016-01-15T12:24:16","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T22:24:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/?p=18105"},"modified":"2016-01-15T12:24:16","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T22:24:16","slug":"solved-40-year-old-mystery-on-the-size-of-shadowy-galaxies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/?p=18105","title":{"rendered":"Solved! 40 Year-old Mystery on the Size of Shadowy Galaxies"},"content":{"rendered":"

W. M. Keck Observatory press release<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Using the world\u2019s largest telescopes, researchers discovered ancient cold gas clouds larger than galaxies in the early Universe. The discovery was announced today at a press conference at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Orlando, Florida.<\/p>\n

\"Gas<\/a>
Artists impression of the power of background galaxies to measure the size of gas clouds as compared to the conventional method of using quasars. Credit: Adrian Malec (Swinburne University) and Marie Martig (Max Plank Institute)<\/figcaption><\/figure>The discovery, led by Associate Professor Jeff Cooke, Swinburne University of Technology, and Associate Professor John O\u2019Meara, St. Michael\u2019s College, has helped solve a decades-old puzzle on the nature of gas clouds, known as damped Lyman alpha systems, or DLAs.<\/p>\n

Cooke and O\u2019Meara realized that finding DLA gas clouds in the line of sight to background galaxies would enable measurements of their size by determining how much of the galaxy they cover.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur new method first identifies galaxies that are more likely to have intervening DLA gas clouds and then searches for them using long, deep exposures on the powerful Keck Observatory 10m telescopes on Maunakea and deep data from the VLT 8m telescopes in Chile,\u201d Cooke said. \u201cThe technique is timely as the next generation of giant 30m telescopes will be online in several years and are ideal to take advantage of this method to routinely gather large numbers of DLAs for study.\u201d<\/p>\n

DLA clouds contain most of the cool gas in the Universe and are predicted to contain enough gas to form most of the stars we see in galaxies around us today, like the Milky Way. However, this prediction has yet to be confirmed.<\/p>\n

DLAs currently have little ongoing star formation, making them too dim to observe directly from their emitted light alone. Instead, they are detected when they happen to fall in the line of sight to a more distant bright object and leave an unmistakeable absorption signature in the background object\u2019s light.<\/p>\n

Previously, researchers used quasars as the background objects to search for DLAs. Although quasars can be very bright, they are rare and are comparatively small, only a fraction of a light year across, whereas galaxies are quite common and provide a 100 million-fold increase in area to probe DLAs.<\/p>\n

\u201cUsing the galaxy technique, DLAs can be studied in large numbers to provide a 3-D tomographic picture of distribution of gas clouds in the early Universe and help complete our understanding of how galaxies formed and evolved over cosmic time,\u201d O\u2019Meara said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

W. M. Keck Observatory press release… Using the world\u2019s largest telescopes, researchers discovered ancient cold gas clouds larger than galaxies in the early Universe. The discovery was announced today at a press conference at the 227th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Orlando, Florida. The discovery, led by Associate Professor Jeff Cooke, Swinburne University … Continue reading “Solved! 40 Year-old Mystery on the Size of Shadowy Galaxies”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[141,2208,50],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18105"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18107,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18105\/revisions\/18107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darkerview.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}